ts cause. And this made him still angrier.

She held out a box. "The others are in your suitcase downstairs. It's
locked and strapped."

"Give me the key, then."

"We might send them back from Venice, mightn't we? That lock is so
nasty: it will take you half an hour."

"Give me the key, please." She gave it.

He went downstairs and battled with the lock, for the allotted
half-hour, under the puzzled eyes of Giulietta and the sardonic grin of
the chauffeur, who now and then, from the threshold, politely reminded
him how long it would take to get to Milan. Finally the key turned, and
Lansing, broken-nailed and perspiring, extracted the cigars and stalked
with them into the deserted drawing room. The great bunches of golden
roses that he and Susy had gathered the day before were dropping their
petals on the marble embroidery of the floor, pale camellias floated in
the alabaster tazzas between the windows, haunting scents of the garden
blew in on him with the breeze from the lake. Never had Streffy's little
house seemed so like a nest of pleasures. Lansing laid the cigar boxes
on a console and ran upstairs to collect his last possessions. When
he came down again, his wife, her eyes brilliant with achievement, was
seated in their borrowed chariot, the luggage cleverly stowed away, and
Giulietta and the gardener kissing her hand and weeping out inconsolable
farewells.

"I wonder what she's given them?" he thought, as he jumped in beside her
and the motor whirled them through the nightingale-thickets to the gate.

IV.

CHARLIE STREFFORD'S villa was like a nest in a rose-bush; the Nelson
Vanderlyns' palace called for loftier analogies.

Its vastness and splendour seemed, in comparison, oppressive to Susy.
Their landing, after dark, at the foot of the great shadowy staircase,
their dinner at a dimly-lit table under a ceiling weighed down with
Olympians, their chilly evening in a corner of a drawing room where
minuets should have been danced before a throne, contrasted with the
happy intimacies of Como as their sudden sense of disaccord contrasted
with the mutual confidence of the day before.

The journey had been particularly jolly: both Susy and Lansing had had
too long a discipline in the art of smoothing things over not to make
a special effort to hide from each other the ravages of their first
disagreement. But, deep down and invisible, the disagreement remained;
and compunction for having been its cause gnaw