along the Tiber, with the Countess’s horses, it would take an hour and a half to reach the Lake di Porto.  She had, too, this pretext, to avoid the curiosity of the servants:  one of the Roman noblewomen of her acquaintance, Princess Torlonia, owned an isolated villa on the border of that lake....  She ascended hastily to don her hat.  And without writing a word of farewell to any one, without even casting a glance at the objects among which she had lived and suffered, she descended the staircase and gave the coachman the name of the villa, adding “Drive quickly; I am late now.”

The Lake di Porto is only, as its name indicates, the port of the ancient Tiber.  The road which leads from Transtevere runs along the river, which rolls through a plain strewn with ruins and indented with barren hills, its brackish water discolored from the sand and mud of the Apennines.

Here groups of eucalyptus, there groups of pine parasols above some ruined walls, were all the vegetation which met Alba Steno’s eye.  But the scene accorded so well with the moral devastation she bore within her that the barrenness around her in her last walk was pleasant to her.

The feeling that she was nearing eternal peace, final sleep in which she should suffer no more, augmented when she alighted from the carriage, and, having passed the garden of Villa Torlonia, she found herself facing the small lake, so grandiose in its smallness by the wildness of its surroundings, and motionless, surprised in even that supreme moment by the magic of that hidden sight, she paused amid the reeds with their red tufts to look at that pond which was to become her tomb, and she murmured: 

“How beautiful it is!”

There was in the humid atmosphere which gradually penetrated her a charm of mortal rest, to which she abandoned herself dreamily, almost with physical voluptuousness, drinking into her being the feverish fumes of that place—­one of the most fatal at that season and at that hour of all that dangerous coast—­until she shuddered in her light summer gown.  Her shoulders contracted, her teeth chattered, and that feeling of discomfort was to her as a signal for action.  She took another allee of rose-bushes in flower to reach a point on the bank barren of vegetation, where was outlined the form of a boat.  She soon detached it, and, managing the heavy oars with her delicate hands, she advanced toward the middle of the lake.

When she was in the spot which she thought the deepest and the most suitable for her design, she ceased rowing.  Then, by a delicate care, which made her smile herself, so much did it betray instinctive and childish order at such a solemn moment, she put her hat, her umbrella and her gloves on one of the transversal boards of the boat.  She had made effort to move the heavy oars, so that she was perspiring.  A second shudder seized her as she was arranging the trifling objects, so keen, so chilly, so that time that she paused.  She lay there motionless, her eyes fixed upon the water, whose undulations lapped the boat.  At the last moment she felt reenter her heart, not love of life, but love for her mother.  All the details of the events which would follow her suicide were presented to her mind.