excursion to Capri and induced to come to the Eternal City as a model.

Too honorable to betray her, he had meant to make the model his wife,
and was betrothed to her with a solemnity of which he was keenly
reminded to-day by the ring which she still wore upon her finger.
Circumstances had convinced him, however, that Ninitta was deceiving
him, and that she preferred the artist Hoffmeir, his best friend. To
break off both engagement and friendship without listening to a word
of explanation, to leave Rome and Italy, were comparatively easy for a
passionate man stung to the quick by a double treachery. To forget was
more difficult, and although a thousand times had Herman assured
himself that he had extinguished the last spark of emotion concerning
this episode, the faintest breath of an old memory was still sufficient
to rekindle some seemingly dead ember. To-day, holding in his hand the
letter from his lost friend which removed all his doubts, he saw that
instead of being injured he had himself been cruel and unjust; he felt
the full anguish of having committed an irreparable fault. We may
outlive our past; its sorrows we may forget, its wrongs we may forgive,
we may even smile at its crushed hopes, ambitions and loves with
scarcely a tinge of bitterness; but that which we have been stings us
ever with the burning pain of an undying remorse. It is not what we
have done which awakens our deepest self-scorn; it is the fact that we
were this which made it possible for us to do it. To feel that he had
been capable of the cruelty of abandoning his betrothed and of wounding
his closest friend, merely from a groundless suspicion, was to Grant
Herman a pain never to be wholly outlived.

Nor was he without a teasing pain, through a less noble trait in his
nature, from the consciousness that he had loved Ninitta. Once the
fires of love have burned out, any mortal is apt to be lost in amazed