and he had found a letter. The countess had gone, leaving the note behind her. It was edged with deep black; and May took it now from his pocket-book, yellow and worn, with a smile that would have been cynical had it not been slightly nervous.
"Très-cher!" it began, "I cannot bear" (it was all in French, but we will make clumsy English of the countess's delicate phrase, as did May, when he read it now) "that your love for me should be your ruin. It is too late for me to deny that you also have my heart; I can only fly. Otherwise my woman's weakness would destroy either you or myself. If you do not wish to betray me, seek not my refuge out. I shall keep the ring as a pledge" (she says nothing about the necklace, it occurred to May, at this late date)—"a pledge that I shall be faithful to you, as, I hope, you to me. For what are six or seven years?" (At her age! thought May, with a shudder.) "I will devote them to my unhappy countrymen." (Compatriotes was the original.) "But wait for me until you are free; and perhaps, who knows? my Italy redeemed! I will join you, and be one with you forever. Meantime you will travel, possibly forget me! But on the fourteenth of August, 1886, you will be at home. On that day you will hear from me!"
May laid the letter down. This was most unquestionably the fourteenth day of August in the year eighteen hundred and eighty-six. He looked nervously at the door of the pavilion, and then through the blinds, in the direction of the house. His face grew fixed and rigid; and the countess's note fell unheeded to the floor.
A carriage was standing before the front door, and beside it stood a footman in livery.
BALLADE OF THE PENITENTS.
By Andrew Lang.
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"Oh, who be ye that doubtful tread "A straiter path we once would tread, |
