 there entered hope, vigour, and self-confidence, instead of
weary indignation and despair. Left after he was twenty to his own guidance
(except for the severe injunction not to return to Costaguana), he had pursued
his studies in Belgium and France with the idea of qualifying for a mining
engineer. But this scientific aspect of his labours remained vague and imperfect
in his mind. Mines had acquired for him a dramatic interest. He studied their
peculiarities from a personal point of view, too, as one would study the varied
characters of men. He visited them as one goes with curiosity to call upon
remarkable persons. He visited mines in Germany, in Spain, in Cornwall.
Abandoned workings had for him strong fascination. Their desolation appealed to
him like the sight of human misery, whose causes are varied and profound. They
might have been worthless, but also they might have been misunderstood. His
future wife was the first, and perhaps the only person to detect this secret
mood which governed the profoundly sensible, almost voiceless attitude of this
man towards the world of material things. And at once her delight in him,
lingering with half-open wings like those birds that cannot rise easily from a
flat level, found a pinnacle from which to soar up into the skies.
    They had become acquainted in Italy, where the future Mrs. Gould was staying
with an old and pale aunt who, years before, had married a middle-aged,
impoverished Italian marquis. She now mourned that man, who had known how to
give up his life to the independence and unity of his country, who had known how
to be as enthusiastic in his generosity as the youngest of those who fell for
that very cause of which old Giorgio Viola was a drifting relic, as a broken
spar is suffered to float away disregarded after a naval victory. The Marchesa
led a still, whispering existence, nun-like in her black robes and a white band
over the forehead, in a corner of the first floor of an ancient and ruinous
palace, whose big, empty halls downstairs sheltered under their painted ceilings
the harvests, the fowls, and even the cattle, together with the whole family of
the tenant farmer.
    The two young people had met in Lucca. After that meeting Charles Gould
visited no mines, though they went together in a carriage, once, to see some
marble quarries, where the work resembled mining in so far that it also was the
tearing of the raw material of treasure from the earth. Charles Gould did not
open his heart to her in any set speeches. He simply went
