they. These happy ones are four, each the object of a different love.
Ottima, whose aged husband is the owner of the silk mills, has a lover
in Sebald. Phene, betrothed to the French sculptor Jules, will be led
this morning to her husband's home. Luigi (a conspiring patriot) meets
his mother at eve in the turret. The Bishop, blessed by God, will sleep
at Asolo to-night. Which love would she choose? The lover's? It gives
cause for scandal. The husband's? It may not last. The parent's? it
alone will guard us to the end of life. God's love? That is best of all.
It is Monsignore she decides to be.

Ottima and her lover have murdered her husband at his villa on the
hillside. She is the more reckless of the two, and she is striving by
the exercise of her attractions to silence Sebald's remorse. She has
succeeded for the moment, when Pippa passes--singing. Something in her
song strikes his conscience like a thunderbolt, and its reviving force
awakens Ottima's also. Both are spiritually saved.

Jules has brought home his bride, and is discovering that some students
who owed him a grudge have practised a cruel cheat upon him; and that
the refined woman by whom he fancied himself loved is but an ignorant
girl of the lowest class, of whom also his enemies have made a tool. Her
remorse at seeing what man she has deceived disarms his anger, and marks
the dawning of a moral sense in her; and he is dismissing her gently,
with all the money he can spare, when Pippa passes--singing.[21]
Something in her song awakens his truer manhood. Why should he dismiss
his wife? Why cast away a soul which needs him, and which he himself
has called into existence? He does not cast Phene away. Her salvation
and his happiness are secured.

Luigi and his mother are in the turret on the hillside above Asolo. He