tenderness; Adonis himself in all the freshness of his youth never
exercised a more potent spell upon enamoured Venus than this plain,
big bearded man over the lonely, untutored Californian girl with the
large loveliness of a goddess and the soul of a little child. What
was the singular fascination which like the "pull" of a magnetic
storm on telegraph wires, forced a woman's tender heart under the
careless foot of a rough creature as indifferent to it as to a
flower he trampled in his path? Nature might explain it in some
unguarded moment of self-betrayal,--but Nature is jealous of her
secrets,--they have to be coaxed out of her in the slow course of
centuries. And with all the coaxing, the subtle work of her woven
threads between the Like and the Unlike remains an unsolved mystery.




CHAPTER VI


From California to Sicily is a long way. It used to be considered
far longer than it is now but in these magical days of aerial and
motor travelling, distance counts but little,--indeed as almost
nothing to the mind of any man or woman brought up in America and
therefore accustomed to "hustle." Morgana Royal had "hustled" the
whole business, staying in Paris a few days only,--in Rome but two
nights; and now here she was, as if she had been spirited over sea
and land by supernatural power, seated in a perfect paradise-garden
of flowers and looking out on the blue Mediterranean with dreamy
eyes in which the lightning flash was nearly if not wholly subdued.
About quarter of a mile distant, and seen through the waving tops of