yn beamed on his wife, sent his daughter off to bed with a
kiss, and leaning back in his armchair before the fruit-and-flower-laden
table, declared that he'd never spent a jollier day in his life. Susy
seemed to come in for a full share of his approbation, and Lansing
thought that Ellie was unusually demonstrative to her friend. Strefford,
from his hostess's side, glanced across now and then at young Mrs.
Lansing, and his glance seemed to Lansing a confidential comment on the
Vanderlyn raptures. But then Strefford was always having private jokes
with people or about them; and Lansing was irritated with himself for
perpetually suspecting his best friends of vague complicities at his
expense. "If I'm going to be jealous of Streffy now--!" he concluded
with a grimace of self-derision.

Certainly Susy looked lovely enough to justify the most irrational
pangs. As a girl she had been, for some people's taste, a trifle
fine-drawn and sharp-edged; now, to her old lightness of line was added
a shadowy bloom, a sort of star-reflecting depth. Her movements were
slower, less angular; her mouth had a needing droop, her lids seemed
weighed down by their lashes; and then suddenly the old spirit would
reveal itself through the new languor, like the tartness at the core
of a sweet fruit. As her husband looked at her across the flowers and
lights he laughed inwardly at the nothingness of all things else.

Vanderlyn and Clarissa left betimes the next morning; and Mrs.
Vanderlyn, who was to start for St. Moritz in the afternoon, devoted
her last hours to anxious conferences with her maid and Susy. Strefford,
with Fred Gillow and the others, had gone for a swim at the Lido, and
Lansing seized the opportunity to get back to his book.

The quietness of the great echoing place gave him a foretaste of the
solitude to come. By mid-August all their party would be scattered: the
Hickses off on a cruise to Crete and the AEgean, Fred Gillow on the way
to his moor, Strefford to stay with friends in Capri till his annual
visit to Northumberland in September. One by one the others would
follow, and Lansing and Susy be left alone in the great sun-proof
palace, alone under the star-laden skies, alone with the great orange
moons-still theirs!--above the bell-tower of San Giorgio. The novel, in
that blessed quiet, would unfold itself as harmoniously as his dreams.

He wrote on, forgetful of the passing hours, till the door opened and he
heard a step beh