like a diver, from an eminence into a misty gulf.  The gulf was destruction, annihilation, death; but if death was decreed, why should not the agony be brief?  Beyond this vision there faintly glimmered another, as in the children’s game of the “magic lantern” a picture is superposed on the white wall before the last one has quite faded.  It represented Mary Garland standing there with eyes in which the horror seemed slowly, slowly to expire, and hanging, motionless hands which at last made no resistance when his own offered to take them.  When, of old, a man was burnt at the stake it was cruel to have to be present; but if one was present it was kind to lend a hand to pile up the fuel and make the flames do their work quickly and the smoke muffle up the victim.  With all deference to your kindness, this was perhaps an obligation you would especially feel if you had a reversionary interest in something the victim was to leave behind him.

One morning, in the midst of all this, Rowland walked heedlessly out of one of the city gates and found himself on the road to Fiesole.  It was a completely lovely day; the March sun felt like May, as the English poet of Florence says; the thick-blossomed shrubs and vines that hung over the walls of villa and podere flung their odorous promise into the warm, still air.  Rowland followed the winding, climbing lanes; lingered, as he got higher, beneath the rusty cypresses, beside the low parapets, where you look down on the charming city and sweep the vale of the Arno; reached the little square before the cathedral, and rested awhile in the massive, dusky church; then climbed higher, to the Franciscan convent which is poised on the very apex of the mountain.  He rang at the little gateway; a shabby, senile, red-faced brother admitted him with almost maudlin friendliness.  There was a dreary chill in the chapel and the corridors, and he passed rapidly through them into the delightfully steep and tangled old garden which runs wild over the forehead of the great hill.  He had been in it before, and he was very fond of it.  The garden hangs in the air, and you ramble from terrace to terrace and wonder how it keeps from slipping down, in full consummation of its bereaved forlornness, into the nakedly romantic gorge beneath.  It was just noon when Rowland went in, and after roaming about awhile he flung himself in the sun on a mossy stone bench and pulled his hat over his eyes.  The short shadows of the brown-coated cypresses above him had grown very long, and yet he had not passed back through the convent.  One of the monks, in his faded snuff-colored robe, came wandering out into the garden, reading his greasy little breviary.  Suddenly he came toward the bench on which Rowland had stretched himself, and paused a moment, attentively.  Rowland was lingering there still; he was sitting with his head in his hands and his elbows on his knees.  He seemed not to have heard the sandaled tread of the good brother, but as the monk remained watching him, he at last