“It is because of all that happened before I left Sassovivo,” she murmured to herself.  “I have got him tangled up in my mind with those miserable affairs.  I am certainly growing nervous, and it will never do.  Away with all that has passed since he became Duke of Sassovivo! Su, Rubiera, whom I knew a soldier years ago, who bade me sing, and laid your drawn sword across the keys of my piano-forte for a motive, —­Rubiera, who came across a chasm to me as I stood clinging to the broken wall, and smiled courage into my sinking heart. Su, Rubiera, who divided the olive-twig with me, promising to challenge me when we met again with Fuori il verde! It was I who showed the green and gave the challenge when we met, and I have the three leaves yet.”  She drew a locket from her breast, and opened it to look at the memento, and at her mother’s miniature enclosed with it.

She was smiling now.  That bright past had thrust aside all painful recollections, and the old cordial, loving confidence was coming up again.

The sun, declining to the palace roofs opposite, flooded the room with light.  It made Aurora’s red dress brilliant, and played and sparkled on the gold she wore.  Twenty little golden chains of Venice hung around her neck, slender thread after thread from throat to girdle, invisible now with fineness, and now showing a misty flash in the sun.  There was a gold filigree rose in her hair, which at certain movements changed to a red rose, and then to a pallid flame, and in the shadow it had all the softness of a yellow rose just blown.

Aurora walked to and fro in the light, a brilliant figure, counting over the treasures of her memory.

“I wonder what I sang that night!” she murmured.  “I never copied it.  It was something about my country.  When I ended they crossed their swords above my head, D’Rubiera and General Pampara.  What did I sing?  I wish I could remember.”

She was so absorbed that a step crossing the next room failed to attract her attention.  She did not even hear the light tap at the door.  But when it opened, and some one entered, closing the door behind him, she turned abruptly and faced the intruder, fully conscious now.

He was an officer, who tossed his cap away at sight of her, and he had the face she had been thinking of,—­the same face, full of life, and more full of joyous excitement than she had ever seen it.

They stood so for a moment, the length of the room between them, gazing at each other, with some sense of floating in all that light, as if they were far up in the sky, they two alone, on their way to heaven.

Then the soldier held up some tiny object in his hand, and came rapidly forward.

“Fuori il verde!!” he cried out.

As in a dream, as though they were indeed being sucked up through the blue unsteady air, Aurora tried to pull the locket from her bosom, and desisted, for, throwing aside the faded leaf, D’Rubiera extended his arms with an “Aurora!” which held all pleading and all command, all passion and all delight, that love can give to the human voice.