Now the light had come to Enrica. It came when she first saw Count
Nobili. It shone in her eyes, it dazzled her, it intoxicated her. On
that day a new world opened before her--a fair and pleasant world,
light with the dawn of love--a world as different as golden summer
to the winter of her home. How she gloried in Nobili! How she loved
him!--his comely looks, his kindling smile (like sunshine everywhere),
his lordly ways, his triumphant prosperity! He had come to her, she
knew not how. She had never sought him. He had come--come like fate.
She never asked herself if it was wrong or right to love him. How
could she help it? Was he not born to be loved? Was he not her own--a
thousand times her own--as he told her--"forever?" She believed in
him as she believed in God. She neither knew nor cared whither she was
drifting, so that it was with him! She was as one sailing with a fair
wind on an endless sea--a sea full of sunlight--sailing she knew
not where! Think no evil of her, I pray you. She was not wicked nor
deceitful--only ignorant, with such ignorance as made the angels fall.

As yet Nobili and Enrica had only met in such manner as has been told
by old Carlotta to her gossip Brigitta. Letters, glances, sighs,
had passed across the street, from palace to palace at the Venetian
casements--under the darkly-ivied archway of the Moorish garden--at
the cathedral in the gray evening light, or in the earliest glow of
summer mornings--and this, so seldom! Every time they had met Nobili
implored Enrica, passionately, to escape from the thralldom of her
life, implored her to become his wife. With his pleading eyes fixed
upon her, he asked her "why she should sacrifice him to the senseless
pride of her aunt? He whose whole life was hers?"

But Enrica shrank from compliance, with a secret sense that she had