“My darling, be calm, be reasonable.  There is no duty in the matter; your father acknowledges that himself.  It is a proposal I am free to accept or reject, as I please; and now I promise you that, as you won’t give me any advice, I shall decide without thinking of you at all.  Will that satisfy you?”

She remained silent for a second or two, and then she said thoughtfully,

“Perhaps you could decide just as if there were no possibility of my ever being your wife?”

“To please you, I will assume that too.”

Then she said, after a bit,

“One word more, dearest; you must grant me this—­that I may always be able to think of it when I am alone and far from you, and be able to reassure myself:  it is the promise I thought I could do so well without.  Now you will give it me?”

“What promise?”

“That whatever happens to you or to me, whatever my father demands of me, and wherever you may have to go, you will never withdraw from what you have undertaken.”

He met the earnest, pleading look of those beautiful eyes without flinching.  His heart was light enough, so far as such a promise was concerned.  Heavier oaths than that lay on him.

“That is simple enough, Natalie,” said he.  “I promise you distinctly that nothing shall cause me to swerve from my allegiance to the Society; I will give absolute and implicit obedience, and the best of such work as I can do.  But they must not ask me to forget my Natalie.”

She rose, still holding his hand, and stood by him, so that he could not quite see her face.  Then she said, in a very low voice indeed,

“Dearest, may I give you a ring?—­you do not wear one at all—­”

“But surely, Natalie, it is for me to choose a ring for you?”

“Ah, it is not that I mean,” she said, quickly, and with her face flushing.  “It is a ring that will remind you of the promise you have given me to-day—­when we may not be able to see each other.”

CHAPTER XXVII.

KIRSKI.

To this pale student from the Reading-room of the British Museum, as he stands on a bridge crossing one of the smaller canals, surely the scene around him must seem one fitted to gladden the heart; for it is Venice at mid-day, in glowing sunlight:  the warm cream-white fronts of the marble palaces and casemented houses, the tall campanili with their golden tips, the vast and glittering domes of the churches, all rising fair and dream-like into the intense dark-blue of a cloudless sky.  How the hot sunlight brings out all the beautiful color of the place—­the richly laden fruit-stalls in the Riva dei Schiavoni; the russet and saffron sails of the vessels; the canal-boats coming in to the steps with huge open tuns of purple wine to be ladled out with copper buckets; and then all around the shining, twinkling plain of the green-hued sea, catching here and there a reflection from the softly red walls of San Giorgio and the steel-gray gleaming domes of Santa Maria della Salute.