better refuge it might do."

Mary felt suddenly as if some very little thing far down in herself was
struggling blindly to escape, as a fly struggles to escape when a glass
tumbler has been shut over it on a table. She drew in a long, deep
breath.

"I'll leave the Hotel de Paris to-morrow," she said, as if to settle the
matter with herself once and for all. "And I'll go and stay at Lady
Dauntrey's."

Almost unconsciously her eyes were fixed upon the old hill town of
Roquebrune, asleep under the square height of its ruined castle, which
the moon streaked with silver. All the little firefly lights of the
village had died out except one, which still shone "like a good deed in
a naughty world."

"It is perhaps the cure's light," Mary thought; and told herself that as
he was a friend of the Prince, she would never dare to go and see him
now.

XVIII

Vanno stood without moving for some minutes, when Mary had gone. She had
forbidden him to follow, but it was not her command which held him back.
It was the command laid upon him by himself. In a light merciless as the
crude glare of electricity he saw himself standing stricken, a fool who
had done an unforgivable thing, a clumsy and brutal wretch who had
broken a crystal vase in a sanctuary. For the blinding light showed him
a new image of Mary, even as she had suddenly revealed herself to
Hannaford: a perfectly innocent creature whose ways were strange as a
dryad's way would be strange if transplanted from her forests into the
most sophisticated colony in Europe.

Something in Vanno which knew, because it felt, had always pronounced
her guiltless; but all of him that was modern and worldly had told him
to distrust her. Now he was like a judge who has condemned a prisoner on
circumstantial evidence, to find out the victim's innocence after the
execution.

Standing there on the bridge, the dance-music troubled the current of
his thoughts, rising to the surface of his mind, though he heard it
without listening, like the teasing bubbles of a spring through deep
water. Though he tried, he could not fully analyze his own feelings;
yet he was sharply conscious of those two conflicting sides of his
nature which Angelo saw, and he could almost hear them arguing together.
The part of him that was aristocrat and ascetic excused itself, asking
what he could have done, better than he had done? Had he not broken his
resolve for a good motive and for the girl's sake, not hi