wall.  The outline seemed almost vaporous, as though melting into the transparency of the quiet air; the gentle brown eyes were at once full of suffering and full of love; the soft, thick hair fell in disorder upon her shoulders, in that exquisite disorder that belongs to beautiful things in nature when they are set free and fall into the position which is essentially their own; her white fingers, refined and expressive, held Corona’s slender olive hand, pressing it and moving as they touched it, with every word she spoke.  Corona almost felt that some spiritual, half divine being had glided down from another world to tell her of an angel’s love.

The elder woman thought of her own life and compared it with what she saw.  Sold to a decrepit old husband who had worshipped her in strange, pathetic fashion of his own, she had spent five years in submitting to an affection she loathed, enduring it to the very end, and sacrificing every instinct of her nature in the performance of her duty.  Liberated at last, she had given herself up to her love for Giovanni, in a passion of the strong kind that never comes in early youth.  She asked herself what had become of that passion, and whether it could ever be revived.  In any case it was something wholly different from the love of which Faustina was speaking.  She had fought against it when it came, with all her might; being gone, it had left her cold and indifferent to all she could still command, incapable of even pretending to love.  It had passed through her life as a whirlwind through a deep forest, and its track was like a scar.  What Faustina knew, she could never have known, the sudden growth within her of something beautiful against which there was no need to struggle, the whole-hearted devotion from the first, the joy of a love that had risen suddenly like the dawn of a fair day, the unspeakable happiness of loving intensely in perfect innocence of the world, of giving her whole soul at once and for ever, unconscious that there could be anything else to give.

“I would die for him, and he would die for me,” Faustina had said, knowing that her words were true.  Corona would die for Giovanni now, no doubt, but not because she loved him any longer.  She would sacrifice herself for what had been, for the memory of it, for the bitterness of having lost it and of feeling that it could not return.  That was a state very different from Faustina’s; it was pain, not happiness, despair, not joy, emptiness, not fulness.  Her eyes grew sad, and she sighed bitterly as though oppressed by a burden from which she could not escape.  Faustina’s future seemed to her to be like a beautiful vision among the clouds of sunrise, her own like the reflection of a mournful scene in a dark pool of stagnant water.  The sorrow of her life rose in her eyes, until the young girl saw it and suddenly ceased speaking.  It was like a reproach to her, for her young nature had already begun to forget its trouble in the sweetness of its own dream.  Corona understood the sudden silence, and her expression changed, for she felt that if she dwelt upon what was nearest to her heart she could give but poor consolation.