But what, after all, were his grievances compared with those of this soft-eyed girl?  It pricked his conscience to remember how feebly he had fought her battle.  She must know that he had done little or nothing for her; yet there was something peculiarly gentle, one might have thought pitiful, in her manner toward him.  His pride winced under it.

* * * * *

Sir James, too, must have his private talk with Diana—­when he took her to the farther extremity of the little terrace, and told her of the results and echoes which had followed the publication, in the Times, of Wing’s dying statement.

Diana had given her sanction to the publication with trembling and a torn mind.  Justice to her mother required it.  There she had no doubt; and her will, therefore, hardened to the act, and to the publicity which it involved.  But Sir Francis Wing’s son was still living, and what for her was piety must be for him stain and dishonor.  She did not shrink; but the compunctions she could not show she felt; and, through Sir James Chide, she had written a little letter which had done something to soften the blow, as it affected a dull yet not inequitable mind.

“Does he forgive us?” she asked, in a low voice, turning her face toward the Umbrian plain, with its twinkling lights below, its stars above.

“He knows he must have done the same in our place,” said Sir James.

After a minute he looked at her closely under the electric light which dominated the terrace.

“I am afraid you have been going through a great deal,” he said, bending over her.  “Put it from you when you can.  You don’t know how people feel for you”

She looked up with her quick smile.

“I don’t always think of it—­and oh!  I am so thankful to know!  I dream of them often—­my father and mother—­but not unhappily.  They are mine—­much, much more than they ever were.”

She clasped her hands, and he felt rather than saw the exaltation, the tender fire in her look.

All very well!  But this stage would pass—­must pass.  She had her own life to live.  And if one man had behaved like a selfish coward, all the more reason to invoke, to hurry on the worthy and the perfect lover.

* * * * *

Presently Marion Vincent appeared, and with her Frobisher, and an unknown man with a magnificent brow, dark eyes of a remarkable vivacity, and a Southern eloquence both of speech and gesture.  He proved to be a famous Italian, a poet well known to European fame, who, having married an English wife, had settled himself at Assisi for the study of St. Francis and the Franciscan literature.  He became at once the centre of a circle which grouped itself on the terrace, while he pointed to spot after spot, dimly white on the shadows of the moon-lit plain, linking each with the Franciscan legend and the passion of Franciscan poetry.