The Secret Power

"And that is?" he asked.

"Happiness!" she replied--"The perfect happiness of life in love!"

He had held her hand till now, when he released it.

"I wish I could give it to you!" he said.

"You cannot, Giulio! I am not made for any man--as men go!"

"It is a pity you think so"--he said--"For--after all--you are just--a woman!"

"Am I?" she murmured,--and a strange flitting smile brightened her features--"Perhaps!--and yet--perhaps not! Who knows!"

She left him puzzled and uneasy. Somehow she always managed to evade his efforts to become more intimate in his relations with her. Generous and kind-hearted as she was, she held him at a distance, and maintained her own aloof position inexorably. A less intelligent man than Rivardi would have adopted the cynic's attitude and averred that her rejection of love and marriage arose from her own unlovableness and unmarriageableness, but he knew better than that. He was wise enough to perceive the rareness and delicacy of her physical and mental organisation and temperament,--a temperament so finely strung as to make all other women seem gross and material beside her. He felt and knew her to be both his moral and intellectual superior,--and this very fact rendered it impossible that he could ever master her mind and tame it down to the subservience of married life. That dauntless spirit of hers would never bend to an inferior,--not even love (if she could feel it) would move her thus far. And the man she had adventured across ocean to rescue--what was he? She confessed that she had loved him, though that love was past. And now she had set herself to watch night and day by his dead body (for dead he surely was in Rivardi's opinion) sparing no pains to recover what seemed beyond recovery; while one of the greatest mysteries of the whole mysterious affair was just this--How had she known the man's life was in danger?

All these questions Rivardi discussed with Don Aloysius, who listened to him patiently without committing himself to any reply. Whatever Morgana had confided to him--(and she had confided much)--he kept his own counsel.

Within forty-eight hours of Morgana's summons the famous specialist from Rome, Professor Marco Ardini, noted all over the world for his miraculous cures of those whom other physicians had given up as past curing, arrived. He heard the story of the rescue of a man and woman from drowning with emotionless gravity, more taken for the moment by Morgana herself, whom he had never seen before, but with whom he had corresponded on current questions of scientific importance. From the extremely learned and incisive tone of her letters he had judged her to be an elderly woman of profound scholarship who had spent the greater part of her life in study, and his astonishment at the sight of the small, dainty creature who received him in the library of the Palazzo d'Oro was beyond all verbal expression,--in fact, he took some minutes to recover from the magnetic "shock" of her blue eyes and wistful smile.