To Leeward Part 40

Ask it of that quiet man, with delicate features and snow-white hair, who drives in the Villa Borghese. He is well-known in Rome for his honesty, his honour, and his unaffected good sense. He is the Marchese Carantoni, he is Marcantonio, and he is not yet forty years of age.

Ask it of Diana de Charleroi,--d.u.c.h.esse de Charleroi now, for her husband has succeeded to the elder t.i.tle. Ask it of her, the mother of brave boys and n.o.ble maidens. She has her beauty still, she is as stately as of yore, and grander in the crown of mature womanhood. But there is a streak of grey even in her fair hair, and a line of sorrow on her forehead, the masterly handwriting of a mastering grief; and her grey eyes are softer and sadder than they were ten years ago.

Ask it of Julius Batis...o...b..,--but of him you will ask in vain. He has the mark of a bullet in his throat, Marcantonio's second shot, that was so nearly fatal to him. He stood aside from the world for a while, and lived a year or two among the monks of Subiaco; he manifested some devotion for her sake who had died for him. And now he is writing novels again, and smoking cigarettes between the phrases, to help his ideas and to stimulate his imagination.