"You won't hear anything about the M---- doings, yet I assure you

they are a most serious matter. Unless I am much mistaken there is

an effort on foot to connect you with my father, which is surely

sufficiently alarming. M---- is returning to Rome, and I hear

rumours of an intention to bring pressure on some one here in

the hope of leading to identification. Think of it, I beg, I

pray!--Your friend,

"R."

VII

Next day Rossi's editorial assistant came with a troubled face. There

was bad news from the office. The morning's edition of the Sunrise had

been confiscated by the police owing to the article on the King's speech

and procession. The proprietors of the paper were angry with their

editor, and demanded to see him immediately.

"Tell them I'll be at the office at four o'clock, as usual," said Rossi,

and he sat down to write a letter.

It was to Roma. The moment he took up the pen to write to her the air of

the room seemed to fill with a sweet feminine presence that banished

everything else. It was like talking to her. She was beside him. He

could hear her soft replies.

"If it were possible to heighten the pain of my feelings when I

decided to sacrifice my best wishes to my sense of duty, a letter

like your last would be more than I could bear. The obstacle you

deal with is not the one which chiefly weighs with me, but it is a

very real impediment, not altogether disposed of by the sweet and

tender womanliness with which you put it aside. In that regard

what troubles me most is the hideous inequality between what the

man gives and what he gets, and the splendid devotion with which

the woman merges her life in the life of the man she marries only

quickens the sense of his selfishness in allowing himself to

accept so great a prize.

"In my own case, the selfishness, if I yielded to it, would be

greater far than anybody else could be guilty of, and of all men

who have sacrificed women's lives to their own career, I should

feel myself to be the most guilty and inexcusable. My dear and

beloved girl is nobly born, and lives in wealth and luxury, while

I am poor--poor by choice, and therefore poor for ever, brought up

as a foundling, and without a name that I dare call my own.

"What then? Shall such a man as I am ask such a woman as she is to

come into the circle of his life, to exchange her riches for his

poverty, her comfort for his suffering? No.




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