ng the same song Greeks and Romans had heard on these shores. He
never tired of meeting the huge carts from Italy, travelling slowly
through the dark. He always had the same keen, foolish wish to know
whence they came, and what were the thoughts behind the bright eyes
which waked from sleep and stared for an instant, as his lamps pried
under the great quaking canopies: and more than all he enjoyed arriving
at his own gate, seeing the pale shimmer of his marble statues against
backgrounds of ivy and ilex, and drawing in the sweetness of his orange
blossoms and roses. Because he never tired of these things the two
months at Stellamare, often spent alone except for servants, were the
best months of his year. Through stress and strain he thought of them,
as a thirsty man thinks of a long draught of cool water; and he spent
them quietly, living in each moment: not complicating his leisure with
many acquaintances or amusements, and neither vexed nor pleased because
people called him selfish, and gossipped about his palace in a garden as
a place mysterious and secret. He was not quite in Paradise in his
retreat there, because he was not a perfectly happy man; but he did not
expect perfect happiness, and hoped for nothing better on earth than his
lonely holidays at Stellamare.

Descending a steep hill toward the sea as the big car slipped between
tall marble gate-posts, a perfume as of all the sweetest flowers of the
world, gathered in a bouquet, was flung into the two men's faces. In the
distance, beyond the house whose windows suddenly lit up as if by magic,
a wide semi-circle of marble columns glimmered pale against the sea's
deep indigo. And away across the stretch of quiet water glittered the
amazing jewels of Monte Carlo.

"By Jove! no Roman emperor could have had a lovelier garden, or a more
splendid palace on this coast," said Carleton, as he stood on the steps
of the house modelled after the description of Pliny's villa at
Laurentum. "Your greatest wish must be fulfilled."

"My greatest wish," Schuyler echoed, with a faint sigh. And in the
starlight his face lost its hard lines. But Carleton did not see.

The door was thrown open by an old Italian servant, who had the profile
of a captive Saracen king.

They went in together, and left the night full of perfume, and the song
of little waves fringed with starlight, that broke on the rocks like
fairy-gold--the vanishing fairy-gold of the Casino across the water.

An