"No,--" and Don Aloysius touched the white fragrant flower with his crucifix--"I will lay it as a votive offering on the altar of the Eternal Virgin!"
* * * * *
About a fortnight later life at the Palazzo d'Oro had settled into organised lines of method and routine. Professor Ardini had selected two competent men attendants, skilled in surgery and medicine to watch Seaton's case with all the care trained nursing could give, and himself had undertaken to visit the patient regularly and report his condition. Seaton's marriage to Manella Soriso had been briefly announced in the European papers and cabled to the American Press, Senator Gwent being one of the first who saw it thus chronicled, much to his amazement.
"He has actually become sane at last!" he soliloquised, "And beauty has conquered science! I gave the girl good advice--I told her to marry him if she could,--and she's done it! I wonder how they escaped that earthquake? Perhaps that brought him to his senses! Well, well! I daresay I shall be seeing them soon over here--I suppose they are spending their honeymoon with Morgana. Curious affair! I'd like to know the ins and outs of it!"
"Have you seen that Roger Seaton is married?" was the question asked of him by every one he knew, especially by the flashing society butterfly once Lydia Herbert, who in these early days of her marriage was getting everything she could out of her millionaire--"And NOT to Morgana! Just think! What a disappointment for her!--I'm sure she was in love with him!"
"I thought so"--Gwent answered, cautiously--"And he with her! But--one never knows--"
"No, one never does!" laughed the fair Lydia--"Poor Morgana! Left on the stalk! But she's so rich it won't matter. She can marry anybody she likes."
"Marriage isn't everything," said Gwent--"To some it may be heaven,--but to others--"
"The worser place!"--agreed Lydia--"And Morgana is not like ordinary women. I wonder what she's doing, and when we shall see her again?"
"Yes--I wonder!" Gwent responded vaguely,--and the subject dropped.
They might have had more than ordinary cause to "wonder" had they been able to form even a guess as to the manner and intentions of life held by the strange half spiritual creature whom they imagined to be but an ordinary mortal moved by the same ephemeral aims and desires as the rest of the grosser world. Who,--even among scientists, accustomed as they are to study the evolution of grubs into lovely rainbow-winged shapes, and the transformation of ordinary weeds into exquisite flowers of perfect form and glorious colour, goes far enough or deep enough to realise similar capability of transformation in a human organism self-trained to so evolve and develop itself? Who, at this time of day,--even with the hourly vivid flashes kindled by the research lamps of science, reverts to former theories of men like De Gabalis, who held that beings in process of finer evolution and formation, and known as "elementals," nourishing their own growth into exquisite existence, through the radio-force of air and fire, may be among us, all unrecognised, yet working their way out of lowness to highness, indifferent to worldly loves, pleasures and opinions, and only bent on the attainment of immortal life? Such beliefs serve only as material for the scoffer and iconoclast,--nevertheless they may be true for all that, and may in the end confound the mockery of materialism which in itself is nothing but the deep shadow cast by a great light.