And he bit his lip to the blood.
Fortune had lifted him out of the drudgery of Morgan-Mason’s service and brought him there to Rome, to a position of confidence envied by ten thousand others. Could he possibly sacrifice his future, his very life, just as it had suddenly opened up to him?
And he pondered on, meeting her, talking with her, and each hour falling deeper under the spell of her marvellous grace and beauty.
Mary, on her part, was full of thought. A frightful gulf was opened before her; she could not fly from its brink; she was goaded onwards though she saw it yawning beneath her feet.
While sitting alone with her father in his room one evening she approached the subject of Felice Solaro; but he instantly poured forth such a flood of invectives upon the condemned man that she was compelled to at once change the subject. To her it seemed that for some unaccountable reason he was prejudiced against the imprisoned man, and anything she might say in his favour only served to condemn him the more.
On looking back upon the past, she found that she had regarded love as a matter of everyday occurrence. She heard of it, saw it wherever she moved; every man who approached her either felt or feigned it; and so accustomed was she to homage and devotion that its absence alone attracted her attention. She had considered it part of her state—and yet of the real nature of true affection she had been perfectly unconscious.
She had more than once imagined herself in love, as in the case of Felice Solaro, mistaking gratified vanity for a deeper emotion—had felt pleasure in the presence of its object, and regret in absence; but that was a pastime and no more—until now.
But now! She held within her heart a deep secret—the secret of her love.
And this rendered her future all the more serious—her marriage all the more a fearful undertaking. She had no escape from her fate; she must marry a man who at least was indifferent to her. Could she ever suffer herself to be decked for this unpromising bridal, this union with a man who at heart was the enemy of her family and whom she hated?
One evening she again met George Macbean. He had returned from Naples, where he had executed a commission given him by the Minister, and had reported to his chief his visit to the commandant of the military district. He afterwards sat with Mary and her mother in one of the smaller reception-rooms of the ponderous old mansion. Mary, who was in a black dinner-dress slightly décolleté, took up her mandoline—the instrument of which he was so fond—and sang the old Tuscan song, in which, with his heart so overburdened, he discerned a hidden meaning—