“You are the most generous woman I ever knew!” I exclaimed.

She looked at me intently.  “You also are generous,” she said.

I stiffened instantly, suspecting a purpose behind her praise.  “I have given you small proof of it!” I said.

She seemed surprised.  “In bringing me this letter?  What else could you do?” She sighed deeply.  “You can give me proof enough now.”

She had dropped into a chair, and I saw that we had reached the most difficult point in our interview.

“Captain Alingdon,” she said, “does any one else know of this letter?”

“No.  I was alone in the archives when I found it.”

“And you spoke of it to no one?”

“To no one.”

“Then no one must know.”

I bowed.  “It is for you to decide.”

She paused.  “Not even my mother,” she continued, with a painful blush.

I looked at her in amazement.  “Not even—?”

She shook her head sadly.  “You think me a cruel daughter?  Well—­he was a cruel friend.  What he did was done for Italy:  shall I allow myself to be surpassed?”

I felt a pang of commiseration for the mother.  “But you will at least tell the Countess—­”

Her eyes filled with tears.  “My poor mother—­don’t make it more difficult for me!”

“But I don’t understand—­”

“Don’t you see that she might find it impossible to forgive him?  She has suffered so much!  And I can’t risk that—­for in her anger she might speak.  And even if she forgave him, she might be tempted to show the letter.  Don’t you see that, even now, a word of this might ruin him?  I will trust his fate to no one.  If Italy needed him then she needs him far more to-day.”

She stood before me magnificently, in the splendor of her great refusal; then she turned to the writing-table at which she had been seated when I came in.  Her sealing-taper was still alight, and she held her brother’s letter to the flame.

I watched her in silence while it burned; but one more question rose to my lips.

“You will tell him, then, what you have done for him?” I cried.

And at that the heroine turned woman, melted and pressed unhappy hands in mine.

“Don’t you see that I can never tell him what I do for him?  That is my gift to Italy,” she said.

The Dilettante.

IT was on an impulse hardly needing the arguments he found himself advancing in its favor, that Thursdale, on his way to the club, turned as usual into Mrs. Vervain’s street.

The “as usual” was his own qualification of the act; a convenient way of bridging the interval—­in days and other sequences—­that lay between this visit and the last.  It was characteristic of him that he instinctively excluded his call two days earlier, with Ruth Gaynor, from the list of his visits to Mrs. Vervain:  the special conditions attending it had made it no more like a visit to Mrs.