palace at Rieti after his proposals were accepted, and carried with him workmen to decorate his house. Rieti was gay in the prospect of a bride who would bring youth, beauty, and society to cheer its loneliness. No one was permitted to see the work going on in the yellow palace, but it did not lose in splendor by the eager gossip of the town. One morning the workmen did not come. The work was finished. The next morning the old state-carriage, newly burnished, and drawn by the old horses in new and glittering harness, passed out of the gates. The servants wore bridal-favors. The blinds were drawn down, and the hard face of the Marquis di Sangrido returned the gratulations of the town.
A few days afterward a courier came dashing into Rieti, and disappeared in the palazzo Sangrido. It was rumored that the bride would arrive before night, and at sunset the bridal cortége appeared. A face more radiantly beautiful than they had ever seen beamed gratitude upon the peasants, who threw flowers before the bride's carriage, and the Marchioness Maddalena di Sangrido went into her palace. There were money and wine distributed in the square of Rieti that night, and prayers were uttered for the bride in the church next morning by those she never saw.
From an old convent in Venice to an old palace in Rieti the change was not great. But the change was entire in all the habits of life; and sometimes, when Maddalena stole away to a lonely corner of the garden, which had been trimmed and beautified in her honor, she looked wistfully at the long range of hills undulating into the blue distance; and, longing for a richer experience, shuddered as she reflected that, while dreaming in the convent-garden, everything was possible; but that, sitting in the garden of the palace, her future was an endless iteration of the present. She grew sad and silent in the rural splendors of Rieti.
The Marquis di Sangrido watched his wife with an intentness that seemed ferocity. If she went alone into the garden he presently appeared, and taking her arm led her back to the house, or paced solemnly and silently at her side, along the stately green avenues.
He was of high family, and great fortune, and of good person. The girls at the convent in Venice sauntered in the sunny garden, and
