Here it was that she received her friends for tea, listening indulgently to lascivious, Tuscan, gossip. Then, alone once more, after her late dinner, or companioned by the man of the hour, it was here she would pace up and down in the sweet-scented dusk while myriads of fireflies like a flaming milky way disbanded at her approach. And high above the swarthy cypresses the sun’s paramour, the moon, shamelessly flaunted in his reflected rays.

Those were enchanted nights into which Julius’s memory intruded like the sordid wraith from another existence; a warning wraith with finger on lips, whose image tempered Anne’s blood. Not that she was discreet, for that was a quality Anne had never troubled to acquire. In fact, her dealings were so recklessly above-board that she was suspected of untold depths of wickedness. A beautiful woman who paces under the stars at midnight with now one man, now another, cannot hope to escape slander.

Although perfectly aware of this fact, Anne chose to ignore it. Even the nominal chaperonage of some poor, but genteel, relative seemed insupportable to the fierce and rapturous reaction through which she was passing. She remained defiantly alone. Her charm, her elegance, and most certainly her wealth (in that way Florentines are most human) carried her through. But rumor was building a wall of eccentricity about her and she was rapidly becoming known, both on the Continent and in America, as rather terrifyingly individual, and an image-breaker.

The most conservative began to drop off almost imperceptibly, leaving a large circle of spirits who prided themselves upon a freedom akin to looseness, and a small band of intimates too close to be affected by the whispers of the scurrilous. Among the latter, the Marchese Torrigiani and his mother refused steadfastly to believe anything but the best of Anne. Their friendship of years continued undisrupted, and both mother and son looked forward with eagerness to the day when Anne would weary of her precarious liberty, and consent to become Vittorio’s wife. But although she admitted to an affection for Vittorio which at times flickered into transient tenderness, her marriage with Julius had developed a complex which made it impossible for her to contemplate the subject without a shrinking horror. Meanwhile the Marchese waited, hoping almost against hope, that with the passing of time the lacerating memory would fade away. But so far it had refused to do so and there were hours when it seemed to the steadfast man as if the scar were branded into Anne’s very soul. Accepting his homage as a matter of course, she had continued to drift along the path of least resistance.

But latterly, a new restlessness was creeping in, and life had somehow lost its savour. The New York season was becoming a grind. Her friends were either blatantly rich, meretricious and over-fed, mere excitement chasers, or else pretenders, art fainéants, who dabbled in cubes and sex. Neurotic composers who dribbled mediocrities over the piano keys. Pseudo writers who reveled in the drab, perhaps because any further flight was beyond their stunted wings. Anne was growing to hate them all, and herself the most, because she had remained too indolent or too powerless to rise above their level. There were superior beings, of course, who were achieving the real thing somewhere. But they dwelt on a different plane, in a workers’ world of their own, whose fastnesses she had never as yet been able to scale. Her music was good, even excellent, almost professional, but that irritating adverb “almost” rose like an impassable Chinese wall, thrusting her forever into the destinationless region of the dilettantes.

Beautiful, brilliant, talented, she remained negligible in her own hypercritical eyes.

To oust this growing dissatisfaction which had sifted into the indolent drift of her life and was gradually embittering it, Anne had literally taken to her heels. Two weeks alone with the mountains had brought a certain serenity. Already the miserly future looked less blank. Soothed by solitudes and distance, her inflamed ego was content to sink into the great whole. After all, there were compensations. She might not be a genius, but that did not prevent genius from existing! And personality was only an illusion after all, a hollow shell, within which the Great Spirit differentiated. Who was she to grumble in the the face of this universal oneness, into which her littleness merged so superbly? The healing breath of the forest swept her clean of vanity. Her soul rejoiced in the vigor of its new-found simplicity. She spent her days roaming in the woods, or paddling about in a canoe on the unrippled waters of the chaste little lake. She re-read one or two favorite books, but all the time her mind remained contentedly empty and receptive, like an airing room whose windows are unclosed to the winds of heaven.

It was in this mood she had come upon the hut and Alexis. Her sleeping self had reawakened and once more taken her into possession. But it was a rested and less inverted self, a younger and more ingenuous self, who still admitted the futility of happiness but dimly craved it. In her present chastened mood she was determined to oust the personal factor. There had been too much of that in all her previous dealings with men. It had always been to that quality of pervasive femininity to which they had succumbed, and consciously or unconsciously, she had never failed to assert it. She was going to change all that. Here was a boy, probably ten years her junior, whose plight would arouse the sympathy of the veriest egotist. Whose unhappiness, combined with his genius, stirred the stagnant pool of her soul. Her quickened spirit responded to his need with almost complete self-forgetfulness. That genius should come to her door in the guise of a postulant, just as she herself had become resigned to her own lack of it, seemed the culminating miracle to her new-found peace of mind. To heal this bruised spirit and send it back to the world in the glory of renewed splendor was her job. And nothing less than success would satisfy her. For once she would step out of the amateur class and prove that she could do one thing thoroughly and well, even if it were so infinitesimal a thing as the rescue of a soul.

CHAPTER IV
THE PAWN

It was one of those crystal October days, when the air is crisp and clean, tempered by a kindly sun and Central Park is etched in russet and gold against a sky of opalescent clouds.