objects among which she had lived and suffered, she descended the
staircase and gave the coachman the name of the villa, adding "Drive
quickly; I am late now."

The Lake di Porto is only, as its name indicates, the port of the ancient
Tiber. The road which leads from Transtevere runs along the river, which
rolls through a plain strewn with ruins and indented with barren hills,
its brackish water discolored from the sand and mud of the Apennines.

Here groups of eucalyptus, there groups of pine parasols above some
ruined walls, were all the vegetation which met Alba Steno's eye. But
the scene accorded so well with the moral devastation she bore within her
that the barrenness around her in her last walk was pleasant to her.

The feeling that she was nearing eternal peace, final sleep in which she
should suffer no more, augmented when she alighted from the carriage,
and, having passed the garden of Villa Torlonia, she found herself facing
the small lake, so grandiose in its smallness by the wildness of its
surroundings, and motionless, surprised in even that supreme moment by
the magic of that hidden sight, she paused amid the reeds with their red
tufts to look at that pond which was to become her tomb, and she
murmured:

"How beautiful it is!"

There was in the humid atmosphere which gradually penetrated her a charm
of mortal rest, to which she abandoned herself dreamily, almost with
physical voluptuousness, drinking into her being the feverish fumes of
that place--one of the most fatal at that season and at that hour of all
that dangerous coast--until she shuddered in her light summer gown. Her