And for a dead love there is no resurrection.
Yet to-night she felt infinitely tender over Fritz, as if she stood by
him again and saw the bandage darkened by the red stain.
Then she thought of the song she had sung to Lady Cardington, the song
which had surely opened the eyes of her own drowsy, if not actually
sleeping, heart:
"Tutto al mondo e vano:
Nell'amore ogni dolcezza."
It was horribly true to her to-night. She could imagine now, in her utter
desolation, that for love a woman could easily sacrifice the world. But
she had had the world--all she called the world--ruthlessly taken from
her, and nothing had been given to her to fill its place. Possibly before
the accident she might have recoiled from the idea of giving up the world
for love. But now, as she walked to and fro, it seemed to her as if a
woman isolated from everything with love possessed the world and all that
is therein. Vaguely she remembered the story she had heard about this
very house, Casa Felice. There had been a romance connected with it. Two
lovers had fled here, had lived here for a long time. She imagined them
now, sitting together at night in this piazza, hearing the waterfall
together, looking at the calm lake together, watching the stars together.
The sound of the water was terrible to her. To them how beautiful it must
have been, how beautiful the light of the stars, and the lonely gardens
stretching along the lake, and the dim paths between the cypresses, and
the great silence that floated over the lake to listen to the waterfall.
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