--" said Lansing, when she stopped.

She sprang up from the table with a laugh. "It will be a scramble; but
I'll manage it, if you'll go up at once and pitch the last things into
your trunk."

"Yes; but look here--have you any idea what it's going to cost?"

She raised her eyebrows gaily. "Why, a good deal less than our railway
tickets. Ottaviano's got a sweetheart in Milan, and hasn't seen her for
six months. When I found that out I knew he'd be going there anyhow."

It was clever of her, and he laughed. But why was it that he had grown
to shrink from even such harmless evidence of her always knowing how to
"manage"? "Oh, well," he said to himself, "she's right: the fellow would
be sure to be going to Milan."

Upstairs, on the way to his dressing room, he found her in a cloud of
finery which her skilful hands were forcibly compressing into a last
portmanteau. He had never seen anyone pack as cleverly as Susy: the way
she coaxed reluctant things into a trunk was a symbol of the way she
fitted discordant facts into her life. "When I'm rich," she often said,
"the thing I shall hate most will be to see an idiot maid at my trunks."

As he passed, she glanced over her shoulder, her face pink with the
struggle, and drew a cigar-box from the depths. "Dearest, do put a
couple of cigars into your pocket as a tip for Ottaviano."

Lansing stared. "Why, what on earth are you doing with Streffy's
cigars?"

"Packing them, of course.... You don't suppose he meant them for those
other people?" She gave him a look of honest wonder.

"I don't know whom he meant them for--but they're not ours...."

She continued to look at him wonderingly. "I don't see what there is to
be solemn about. The cigars are not Streffy's either... you may be sure
he got them out of some bounder. And there's nothing he'd hate more than
to have them passed on to another."

"Nonsense. If they're not Streffy's they're much less mine. Hand them
over, please, dear."

"Just as you like. But it does seem a waste; and, of course, the other
people will never have one of them.... The gardener and Giulietta's
lover will see to that!"

Lansing looked away from her at the waves of lace and muslin from which
she emerged like a rosy Nereid. "How many boxes of them are left?"

"Only four."

"Unpack them, please."

Before she moved there was a pause so full of challenge that Lansing had
time for an exasperated sense of the disproportion between his anger and
i