Page:Her Roman Lover (Frothingham, 1911).djvu/176



N the flush and wonder of her happiness Anne asked herself why she had been troubled by Gino’s faults, why she had allowed herself to be touched by the wings of that cold spirit which considers and withholds, weighing things not by joy, but by a complex and insistent morality. With the wonderful cup brimming and glowing at her lips, why had she sought to temporize? She seemed to herself to be becoming simpler, closer to the elemental forces which are more alive in the old world than in that Puritan corner of the new to which she belonged.

Gino, in the realization of a happiness resolutely sought during what he persisted in considering the cruelly long period of two months, surrounded her by a love which was all that a woman could dream of, and more, Anne realized, than is the lot of many women to find. What Lady Fitz-Smith had said was true: Gino Curatulo was a born lover, and in loving as in nothing else came to the ultimate development of his nature.