Page:In a winter city, by Ouida.djvu/285

 An Italian has infinite passion, but he has also infinite patience in matters of love. Nor was he, now that he was assured of his power over her, wholly content to use it; if he married her, the world would always say that it was for her wealth. That means of raising his own fortunes which had seemed to him so material and legitimate all his life, now seemed to him unworthy and unmanly since he had grown to care for her. He knew that such riches as she possessed were precisely those with which he had always intended to rebuild the fallen greatness of his race; but since he had loved her it looked very different.

The charm of their intercourse to him was the ascendency he had won over her, the power that he had gained to lift her nature to a higher level: where would his influence be when he had once stooped to enrich himself by its means?

These fancies saddened him and checked him, and made him not unwilling to linger on about her, in all that indistinct sweetness of half-recognised and half-unspoken love.

The position, uncertain as it was, had its