success for one and all. Superstitious as she was, she raised a cry of
rapture and excitement: "Ah! /Dio/, that will bring us good luck. How
happy I am, my friend, to see happiness coming to you at the same time as
to me! You cannot think how pleased I am! And all will go well now, it's
certain, for a house where there is any one whom the Pope welcomes is
blessed, the thunder of Heaven falls on it no more!"

She laughed yet more loudly as she spoke, and clapped her hands with such
exuberant gaiety that Pierre became anxious. "Hush! hush!" said he, "it's
a secret. Pray don't mention it to any one, either your aunt or even his
Eminence. Monsignor Nani would be much annoyed."

She thereupon promised to say nothing, and in a kindly voice spoke of
Nani as a benefactor, for was she not indebted to him for the dissolution
of her marriage? Then, with a fresh explosion of gaiety, she went on:
"But come, my friend, is not happiness the only good thing? You don't ask
me to weep over the suffering poor to-day! Ah! the happiness of life,
that's everything. People don't suffer or feel cold or hungry when they
are happy."

He looked at her in stupefaction at the idea of that strange solution of
the terrible question of human misery. And suddenly he realised that,
with that daughter of the sun who had inherited so many centuries of
sovereign aristocracy, all his endeavours at conversion were vain. He had
wished to bring her to a Christian love for the lowly and the wretched,
win her over to the new, enlightened, and compassionate Italy that he had
dreamt of; but if she had been moved by the sufferings of the multitude
at the time when she herself had suffered, when grievous wounds had made
her own heart bleed, she was no sooner healed than she proclaimed the
doctrine of universal felicity like a true daughter of a clime of burning