to each other in the dark. Suddenly she laughed aloud.

"I ought never to have gone so far away," she remarked to the night.
"What would Aunt Alice say? Anyway he is a gentleman, even if he is a
god!"

"For I thought only of myself," the pen continued, "and ignored the
obligations I had accepted. It is for you to choose whether you wish
the words of that afternoon unsaid."

The letter signed and sealed, she rose with a great sigh of relief, and
walked out upon the balcony. Overhead was the deep blue sky of a Roman
night, broken by the splendor of the stars. She leaned over the stone
railing of the balcony, feeling beneath her, beyond the shadow of the
cypress trees, the distance and darkness of the Campagna. There was a
murmur of water from the fountain in the garden, and from the cascades
on the hill.

"If he were Apollo," she announced to the listening stars, "it would
not be a bit more wonderful than the rest of it. This is just a
different world, that is all, and who knows whom I shall meet next?
Maybe, if I haunt the hills, Diana will come and invite me to go
a-hunting. Perhaps if Anna had stayed at home this world would seem
nearer."

She came back into the salon, but before she knew it, her feet were
moving to a half-remembered measure, and she found herself dancing
about the great room in the dim light, the cream-colored draperies of
her dinner gown moving rhythmically after her. Suddenly she stopped
short, realizing that her feet were keeping pace with the whistling of
this afternoon, the very notes that had terrified her while the
stranger was unseen. She turned her attention to a piece of tapestry
on the wall, tracing the faded pattern with slim fingers. For the
twentieth time her eyes wandered to the mosaic floor, to the splendid,
tarnished mirrors on the walls, to the carved chairs and table legs,
wrought into cunning patterns of leaf and stem.

"Oh, it is all perfect! and I've got it all to myself!" she exclaimed.

Then she seated herself at the table again and began another letter.

Padre mio,--It is an enchanted country! You never saw such beauty of
sky and grass and trees. These cypresses and poplars seem to have been
standing against the blue sky from all eternity; time is annihilated,
and the gods of Greece and Rome are wandering about the hills.

Anna has gone away. Her father-in-law is very ill, and naturally Count
Accolanti is gone too. Even the cook has departed, because