ssing phase."

"She appears to escape from reality into a world of pictures and music,"
he said. "You must guard against that, my dear Walter. These things can
be of no permanent interest to a healthy mind."

For a fortnight they saw much of their friends, and Mary observed
how her father expanded in the atmosphere of Ernest and Nelly. They
understood each other so well and echoed so many similar sentiments and
convictions.

Ernest entertained a poor opinion of the Italian character. He argued
that a nation which depended for its prosperity on wines and silk--"and
such wines"--must have too much of the feminine in it to excel. He had a
shadowy idea that he understood the language, though he could not speak
nor write it himself.

"We, who have been nurtured at Eton and Oxford, remember enough Latin
to understand these people," he said, "for what is Italian but the
emasculated tongue of ancient Rome?"

Nelly Travers committed herself to many utterances as idiotic as
Ernest's, and Mary secretly wondered to find how shadowy and ridiculous
such solid people showed in a strange land. They carried their ignorance
and their parochial atmosphere with them as openly and unashamedly as
they carried their luggage. She was not sorry to leave them, for she and
her father intended to stop for a while at Como before returning home
again.

Their friends were going to motor over the battlefields of France
presently, and both Ernest and Nelly came to see Sir Walter and his
daughter off for Milan. Mr. Travers rushed to the door of the carriage
and thrust in a newspaper as the train moved.

"I have secured a copy of last week's 'Field,' Walter," he said.

They passed over the Apennines on a night when the fire-flies flashed
in every thicket under the starry gloom of a clear and moonless sky;
and when the train stopped at little, silent stations the throb of
nightingales fell upon their ears.

But circumstances prevented their visit to the Larian Lake, for at Milan
letters awaited Sir Walter from home, and among them one that hastened
his return. From a stranger it came, and chance willed that the writer,
an Italian, had actually made the journey from Rome to London in order
that he might see Sir Walter, while all the time the master of Chadlands
happened to be within half a day's travel. Now, the writer was still in
London, and proposed to stop there until he should receive an answer
to his communication. He wrote guardedly, and