"Dear Father Aloysius!" interrupted Morgana, quickly and impulsively--"Forgive me!--I did not think!--I am sure you and the Marchese and Lady Kingswood have the kindest feeling for me!--but--"
"But!"--and Aloysius smiled--"But--it is a little lady that will not be commanded or controlled! Yes--that is so! However this may be, let us not imagine that in the rush of commerce and the marvels of science the world is left empty of love! Love is still the strongest force in nature!"
Morgana's eyes flashed up, then drooped under their white lids fringed with gold.
"You think so?" she murmured--"To me, love leads nowhere!"
"Except to Heaven!" said Aloysius.
There followed a silence.
It was broken by the entrance of a servant announcing that coffee was served in the loggia. They left the dinner-table and went out into the wonder of a perfect Sicilian moonlight. All the gardens were illumined and the sea beyond, with wide strands of silver spreading on all sides, falling over the marble pavements and steps of the loggia and glistening on certain white flowering shrubs with the smooth sheen of polished pearl. The magical loveliness of the scene, made lovelier by the intense silence of the hour, held them as with a binding spell, and Morgana, standing by one of the slender columns which not only supported the loggia but the whole Palazzo d'Oro as with the petrified stems of trees, made a figure completely in harmony with her surroundings.
"Could anything be more enchantingly beautiful!" sighed Lady Kingswood--"One ought to thank God for eyes to see it!"
"And many people with eyes would not see it at all,"--said Don Aloysius--"They would go indoors, shut the shutters and play Bridge! But those who can see it are the happiest!"
And he quoted-"'On such a night as this, When the sweet wind did gently kiss the trees And they did make no noise,--on such a night Troilus, methinks, mounted the Trojan walls And sighed his soul towards the Grecian tents Where Cressid lay!'"
"You know your Shakespeare!" said Rivardi.
"Who would not know him!" replied Aloysius--"One is not blind to the sun!"
"Ah, poor Shakespeare!" said Morgana--"What a lesson he gives us miserable little moderns in the worth of fame! So great, so unapproachable,--and yet!--doubted and slandered and reviled three hundred years after his death by envious detractors who cannot write a line!"