marks with its shadow the passing hours.

The whole of October was devoted to furnishing them.

When the rooms were all finished and decorated to his taste, he passed some days of invincible melancholy and loneliness in his new abode.

It was a St.Martin's summer, a 'Springtime of the Dead,' calmly sad and sweet, in which Rome lay all golden, like a city of the Far East, under a milk-white sky, diaphanous as the firmament reflected in Southern seas.
All this languor of atmosphere and light, in which things seemed to lose their substance and reality, oppressed the young man with an infinite weariness, an inexpressible sense of discontent, of discomfort, of solitude, emptiness and home-sickness, mostly, no doubt, the result of the change of climate and customs.
It was just this, that he was entering upon a new phase of life.

Would he find therein the woman and the work capable of dominating his heart and becoming an object in life to him?
Within himself he felt neither the conviction of power nor the presage of fame or happiness.