not fallen in his path.  As is usual with such men, when love came at last, it came with a strength such as boys of twenty do not dream of.  The mature man of thirty years, with his strong and dominant temper, his carelessness of danger, his high and untried ideals of what a true affection should be, resisting the first impressions of the master-passion with the indifference of one accustomed to believe that love could not come near his life, and was in general a thing to be avoided—­a man, moreover, who by his individual gifts and by his brilliant position was able to command much that smaller men would not dream of aspiring to,—­such a man, in short, as Giovanni Saracinesca,—­was not likely to experience love-sickness in a mild degree.  Proud, despotic, and fiercely unyielding by his inheritance of temper, he was outwardly gentle and courteous by acquired habit, a man of those whom women easily love and men very generally fear.

He did not realise his own nature, he did not suspect the extremes of feeling of which he was eminently capable.  He had at first felt Corona’s influence, and her face and voice seemed to awaken in him a memory, which was as yet but an anticipation, and not a real remembrance.  It was as the faint perfume of the spring wafted up to a prisoner in some stern fortress, as the first gentle sweetness that rose from the enchanted lakes of the cisalpine country to the nostrils of the war-hardened Goths as they descended the last snow-slopes in their southern wandering—­an anticipation that seemed already a memory, a looking forward again to something that had been already loved in a former state.  Giovanni had laughed at himself for it at first, then he had dreaded its growing charm, and at the last he had fallen hopelessly under the spell, retaining only enough of his former self to make him determined that the harm which had come upon himself should not come near this woman whom he so adored.

And behold, at the first provocation, the very first time that by a careless word she had fired his blood and set his brain throbbing, he had not only been unable to hide what he felt, but had spoken such words as he would not have believed he could speak—­so bluntly, so roughly, that she had almost fainted before his very eyes.

She must have been very angry, he thought.  Perhaps, too, she was frightened.  It was so rude, so utterly contrary to all that was chivalrous to say thus at the first opportunity, “I love you”—­just that and nothing more.  Giovanni had never thought much about it, but he supposed that men in love, very seriously in love, must take a long time to express themselves, as is the manner in books; whereas he was horrified at his own bluntness in having blurted out rashly such words as could never be taken back, as could never even be explained now, he feared, because he had put himself beyond the pale of all explanation, perhaps beyond the reach of forgiveness.