The two men looked at each other in silence.
"You will not succeed by thwarting her!"--said Aloysius, warningly.
Rivardi gave an impatient gesture.
"And you?"
"I? My son, I have no aim in view with regard to her! I should like to see her happy--she has great wealth, and great gifts of intellect and ability--but these do not make real happiness for a woman. And yet--I doubt whether she could ever be happy in the ordinary woman's way."
"No, because she is not an 'ordinary' woman," said Rivardi, quickly--"More's the pity I think--for HER!"
"And for you!" added Aloysius, meaningly.
Rivardi made no answer, and they walked on in silence, the priest parting with his companion at the gate of the monastery, and the Marchese going on to his own half-ruined villa lifting its crumbling walls out of wild verdure and suggesting the historic past, when a Caesar spent festal hours in its great gardens which were now a wilderness.
Meanwhile, Morgana, the subject of their mutual thoughts, followed the path she had taken down to the seashore. Alone there, she stood absorbed,--a fairylike figure in her shimmering soft robe and the diamonds flashing in her hair--now looking at the moonlit water,--now back to the beautiful outline of the Palazzo d'Oro, lifted on its rocky height and surrounded by a paradise of flowers and foliage--then to the long wide structure of the huge shed where her wonderful air-ship lay, as it were, in harbour. She stretched out her arms with a fatigued, appealing gesture.
"I have all I want!"--she said softly aloud,--"All!--all that money can buy--more than money has ever bought!--and yet--the unknown quantity called happiness is not in the bargain. What is it? Why is it? I am like the princess in the 'Arabian Nights' who was quite satisfied with her beautiful palace till an old woman came along and told her that it wanted a roc's egg to make it perfect. And she became at once miserable and discontented because she had not the roc's egg! I thought her a fool when I read that story in my childhood--but I am as great a fool as she to-day. I want that roc's egg!"
She laughed to herself and looked up at the splendid moon, round as a golden shield in heaven.
"How the moon shone that night in California!" she murmured--"And Roger Seaton--bear-man as he is--would have given worlds to hold me in his arms and kiss me as he did once when he 'didn't mean it!' Ah! I wonder if he ever WILL mean it! Perhaps--when it is too late!"