The duchess smiled.
"I am the past from to-night, ma mie," she replied. "Do you remember the time when we contemplated our faces in the old cracked mirror up at the Villa Margherita? I warned you that it would prove the mirror of truth."
"Do not suggest such horrors," answered the baroness. "You give me a migraine only to listen to you."
Later, the duchess sighed as she passed through her own rooms. She had worn the mask of conventional animation during the evening, but now that she was alone her features were pale and careworn.
The old palace of the Ginestre told no tales, yet wealth was rapidly ebbing away from the portals. The noble lady did not dare to contemplate the future. She shrank from questioning too closely the jewels she wore.
The world has changed since the bride with a dowry of a million scudi was painted on the wedding-fan. The baroness, had she been there, would have laughed away such painful reflections with her airiest badinage. The baroness was a daughter of her century. Let the world change, only take care to change with it.
The duchess felt her lace draperies softly pulled. She uttered a faint cry. Her nerves were shaken, and the hour was late.
A little marble hand, once modelled from her own by a young sculptor, had caught in the meshes of the lace. The hand usually rested on a writing-table, doing service as a paper-weight. Now the white fingers seemed to clutch her dress, as if endowed with the instinct of life. She turned hastily, and the hand, detached by the sudden movement, fell on the cement floor and was broken.
A maid hastened to gather up the fragments.
The duchess again sighed. She remembered vaguely having heard that some accident had happened to this very sculptor. Alas! she had intended to assist all those poor people up at Spina. How the seasons pass!
A month later Dr. Weisener stopped at Cortona. He recalled the circumstance of his friend's having given him an introduction to the director of an insane asylum of the vicinity. He searched his portemanteau, and found the pamphlet of Dr. Stellmacher, of Vienna, which he had completely forgotten until that moment. His actual motive for revisiting the spot was to verify an assertion already made in the "Etruscan Inscriptions," in a locality rich in such vestiges of antiquity.
He readily found the establishment for which he sought.
The asylum was a monastery situated on the summit of a hill, the garden and court enclosed within high walls. The place was suggestive of an isolation as complete as in the day of the most rigid monastic rule. The gray hill-side was skirted by olive-trees, and the ploughed fields still bore witness to the skill in agriculture of the former inmates of the cloister.
Meditating on the practical uses made of convents by modern Italy in adapting them to the requirements of barrack and hospital, the doctor rang the bell, and was ushered into the court by the porter.
