that he was a good-looking fellow, a good sportsman, sufficiently well gifted, and of excellent behaviour.  There was the more merit in the admission, they maintained, because they had been inclined to doubt the man, and had accused him of marrying out of pure love of money.  A keen judge of men might have thought that his handsome features were almost too still and too much like a mask, that his manner was so quiet as to be almost expressionless, and that the soft intonation of his speech was almost too monotonous to be natural.  But all this was just what his wife admired, and she encouraged her son to imitate it.  His father had been a man of quick impulses, weak to-day, strong to-morrow, restless, of uncertain temper, easily enthusiastic and easily cast down, capable of sudden emotions, and never able to conceal what he felt if he had cared to do so.  Marcello had inherited his father’s character and his mother’s face, as often happens; but his unquiet disposition was tempered as yet by a certain almost girlish docility, which had clung to him from childhood as the result of being brought up almost entirely by the mother he worshipped.  And now, for the first time, comparing him with her second husband, she realised the boy’s girlishness, and wished him to outgrow it.  Her own ideal of what even a young man should be was as unpractical as that of many thoroughly good and thoroughly unworldly mothers.  She wished her son to be a man at all points, and yet she dreamed that he might remain a sort of glorified young girl; she desired him to be well prepared to face the world when he grew up, and yet it was her dearest wish that he might never know anything of the world’s wickedness.  Corbario seemed to understand her better in this than she understood herself, and devoted his excellent gifts and his almost superhuman patience to the task of forming a modern Galahad.  Her confidence in her husband increased month by month, and year by year.

“I wish to make a new will,” she said to her lawyer in the third year of her marriage.  “I shall leave my husband a life-interest in a part of my fortune, and the reversion of the whole in case anything should happen to my son.”

The lawyer was a middle-aged man, with hard black eyes.  While he was listening to a client, he had a habit of folding his arms tightly across his chest and crossing one leg over the other.  When the Signora Corbario had finished speaking he sat quite still for a moment, and then noiselessly reversed the crossing of his legs and the folding of his arms, and looked into her face.  It was very gentle, fair, and thoughtful.

“I presume,” answered the lawyer, “that the clause providing for a reversion is only intended as an expression of your confidence in your husband?”

“Affection,” answered the Signora, “includes confidence.”

The lawyer raised one eyebrow almost imperceptibly, and changed his position a little.

“Heaven forbid,” he said, “that any accident should befall your son!”