Slighted Love

Italy Vale! When you heard her name you associated it with blue skies, with orange-groves, and rippling streams; when you saw her face you thought of music and poetry and flowers; of dusky pansies like her somber eyes; of pale-pink roses like her cheeks; of scarlet geraniums like her lips; of young palm-trees that were not more graceful than her slender form, and of the purple bloom of the grape that seemed to linger on her dark, waving tresses—but it was not beneath tropic skies you found her, but on a flat, sandy, wind-swept beach of bleak Massachusetts, at Winthrop-by-the-Sea, a brilliant, dusky-eyed, foreign-looking girl, like some rare-plumaged, tropical bird alighted on an alien shore.

She was young, she was maddeningly lovely, this girl, and but a few months before she had knelt beneath the blossoming limes in an old Italian garden, and looking up with dark, pathetic eyes into the pale, fair face above her, had murmured anxiously:

“Mama, why do we lead so lonely a life? Why do people seem to shun us? What have we done?”

The mother’s soft blue eyes had filled with tears as she faltered:

“So you have seen it, my darling? I can no longer hide from you our desolation.”