was a soul in it, a yearning as in all souls. She put down
her cheek on Bobby's head, and, thus unseen, the tears came stealing.

"Poor child," thought the Marchesa, who divined those tears she could
not see, "poor child ... but I must speak to-night--I must--I really
must."

When they reached Baveno, the Marchesa insisted on getting out and going
up to the hotel with Sophy to see that she was given nice rooms.
Something about the young woman, all alone with her little son, went to
her heart. The Marchesa herself had not been very happy in her marriage.
Her fullest life had been lived as the mother of her two boys. Thus
Sophy and Bobby touched her very nearly.

"She seems quite worn out all of a sudden, poor child," said she, as she
rejoined Amaldi. Without apparently looking at her son, she saw the
quick change that came over his face when she said that Sophy seemed
worn out. He made the _Meccanico_ sit in the bow, and himself steered
the little _Fretta_ all the way to "Le Vigne." He talked very little on
the way home, chiefly about the farm and the weather. He was afraid it
might be going to rain to-morrow. There were clouds slowly rising behind
the Sasso.

"Then you'll have to put off your villa-hunt with Mrs. Chesney," he
said. He said this very naturally, pronouncing the name without the
least self-consciousness. The Marchesa felt that her task was going to
be very difficult indeed. She, too, lapsed into silence, now watching
the lovely sky, now glancing at her son's dark, nervous hands as they
turned the little wheel slightly from time to time. Passionate hands
they were. The Marchesa had been a passionate nature herself. She could
feel with Marco as well as for him.

Le Vigne, or the Castello Amaldi, as it was sometimes called, lay on the
Lombard shore of the Lake not far from Angera. It had been one of the
old hunting lodges of the Amaldi, in more sumptuous days. It was really
no more a castle than the Castello di Frino, on the hills above the
village of Ghiffa; though it had, what Frino had not, a massive
reconnoitring tower at one corner of the quadrangle of buildings that
formed a court behind the house itself. It made a delightful summer
home, standing close to the lake shore and surrounded by a farm of some
two thousand acres. It was of white stucco with thick, ancient walls. A
terrace along the front led by long, shallow steps to the lawns and
gardens, which reached to the water. Behind, in the build