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felt it at certain times bursting forth and developing and palpitating around him. Then, if he was in the arms of his beloved, it gave his and her body and soul one of those supreme feasts, the memory of which alone is sufficient to illuminate an entire life. But if he was on his own, a deep anguish pressed down upon him, an inexpressible regret at the thought that that great and rare apparatus of love was going uselessly to waste.
    Uselessly! In the tall Florentine goblets the roses, also waiting, exhaled all their intimate sweetness. On the couch, on the wall, the silvery verses dedicated to the glory of women and wine, which blended so harmoniously with the indefinable silken colors in the sixteenth-century Persian carpet, scintillated as they were struck by the light of the setting sun in a bare corner framed by the window, which rendered the nearby shadows more diaphanous and spread their glow to the cushions beneath. The shadow all around was diaphanous and rich, almost animated by the vague luminous palpitation found in dark sanctuaries that hold some occult treasure. The fire in the fireplace crackled; and each of its flames was, as in Percy Shelley’s imagery, like a precious stone dissolved in ever-moving light. 4 It seemed to the lover that every shape, every color, every scent offered up the most delicate flower of its essence, in that moment. And
she
was not coming! And
she
was not coming!
    Then there arose in his mind, for the first time, the thought of her husband.
    Elena was no longer free. She had renounced the merry freedom of her widowhood, entering into a second marriage with an English gentleman, a certain Lord Humphrey Heathfield, some months after her sudden departure from Rome. Andrea indeed remembered having seen the announcement of the marriage in a social column, in October 1885; and having heard an infinite number of comments about the new Lady Helen Heathfield throughout all the holiday resorts in that Roman autumn. He also remembered having encountered that Lord Humphrey about ten times during the preceding winter at Princess Giustiniani-Bandini’s home on Saturdays, and at public auctions. He was a man of forty, with ash-blond hair, bald at the temples, deadly pale; with light-colored sharp eyes and a great protruding forehead crisscrossed by veins. His name, Heathfield, was indeed that of the lieutenant general who had been the hero of the famous defense of Gibraltar (1779–83), also immortalized by Joshua Reynolds’s paintbrush.
    What part did that man play in Elena’s life? By what ties, beyond those of marriage, was Elena bound to him? What transformations had the material and spiritual contact of her husband exerted upon her?
    Enigmas arose all of a sudden in Andrea’s mind, tumultuously. Amid this tumult, the image of the physical union of those two appeared to him, clear and precise; and the pain was so unbearable that he bounded up with the instinctive reflex of a man who has suddenly been wounded in a vital limb. He crossed the room, went out into the entrance hall, and listened at the door that he had left slightly open. It was almost a quarter to five.
    After a while he heard footsteps coming up the stairs, a rustle of skirts, someone breathing heavily. Certainly, a woman was coming up. All his blood then surged with such vehemence that, unnerved by the long wait, he thought he would lose all his strength and collapse. But still he heard the sound of the feminine foot on the last steps, a longer breath being drawn, her tread on the landing, on the threshold. Elena entered.
    â€”Oh, Elena! Finally.
    In those words the expression of his protracted anguish was so profound that an indefinable smile appeared on the woman’s lips, of compassion mixed with pleasure. He took her right hand, ungloved, pulling her toward the room. She was still panting; but a faint glow lit her entire face beneath the black veil.
    â€”Forgive me, Andrea. But I couldn’t get