nd Leila
Grey----! Had he cared? Had she? . . . Unconsciously her young heart
repudiated her cousin's reading of the affair. As if Barry Elder would
be unsuccessful with any woman that he wanted! That was unbelievable. He
had not wanted her--enough.

He could not want Leila now or he would not have spoken so of coming to
the mountains to see _her_--his direct glance had been a promise, his
eyes a prophecy.

Dared she believe him? Dared she trust? But he was no deceiver, no
flirt, like the lady-killers who used to come to the Palazzo to bow over
Lucia's hand and eye each other with that half hostile, half knowing
swagger. She had watched them. . . . But this was America.

And Barry Elder was--different.

She was lost to the world about her now. Its color and motion and hot
counterfeit of life beat insensibly upon her; she was aware of it only
as an imposition, a denial to that something within her which wanted to
relax into quiet and dreaming, which wanted to live over and over again
the intoxicating excitement, the looks, the words. . . .

She was grateful when Cousin Jane declared for an early return. She
could hardly wait to be alone.

"_What did I tell you?_" Jane Blair stopped suddenly in their progress
to the door and turned to her husband in low-toned triumph. "She's with
him. Leila's with him."

"Huh?" said Cousin Jim unexcitedly.

"She's pretended some errand in town--she's come in to get hold of him
again," went on Cousin Jane hurriedly, as one who tells the story of the
act to the unobservant. "She's afraid to leave him alone. . . . And he
never mentioned her. I wonder----"

Maria Angelina's eyes had followed theirs. She saw a group about a
table, she saw Barry Elder's white-clad shoulders and curly brown head.
She saw, unregardfully, a man and woman with him, but all her eagerness,
all her straining vision was on the young girl with him--a girl so
blonde, so beautiful that a pang went to Maria Angelina's heart. She
learned pain in a single throb.

She heard Cousin Jim quoting oddly in undertone, "'And Beauty drew him,
by a single hair,'" and the words entered her consciousness hauntingly.

If Leila Grey looked like that--why then----

Yet he had said that he would come!

Maria Angelina's first night in America, like that last night in Italy,
was of sleepless watching through the dark. But now there were no
child's tears at leaving home. There was no anxious planning for poor
Julietta. Alrea