t I should be glad if a merciful
angel's attention had not been drawn to me, and I perhaps might have
escaped the dreary prolongation of years. I am sorry, but so it is.

Pray do not conceive any relation between what I have just written and
the request that follows. Will you be so kind as to return the object
belonging to me which I miss from the little table-drawer at the head of
my bed? You had no right to take it.

Vincent Johns is coming in a day or two. Do not think of me, therefore,
as lonely or neglected.

I find I must hurry or be too late. This letter is beastly and ought to
be torn up like the others. It simply cannot; it must go. I can only
pray, Aurora, that you will understand.

* * * * *

Aurora went back to the beginning and read the letter a second time.
Then she turned to the accompanying parcel and noticed that it was done
up in a shabby piece of old newspaper. It contained a pair of fur-lined
velvet shoes, a bow-knot of blue satin ribbon, and a bottle of almond
milk, things of her own which through carelessness had been left behind.
She could not know that the honest Giovanna alone was responsible for
this return of her property. Coming at that moment, it formed the
occasion for two stinging tears rising to the edge of Aurora's eyes. She
swept them away with the back of her glove, and forbade any more to
follow. To prevent them she took her lips between her teeth, and with
all her strength called upon her pride.

She read Gerald's letter over again, really trying to understand, to be
fair, to interpret it in the high-minded way he would wish.

"When all is said, it amounts to this,"--she reached the end of that
exercise by a short cut,--"he wants to be let alone."

And after every allowance had been made for him, and all due deference
paid to his excellent reasons, still it seemed to her what she couldn't
call anything but a poor return. Because his letter was bound to hurt
her, and he must have known it. His sending it, therefore, argued a lack
of any very deep affection for her. After she had come, just from his
own words and actions, to supposing....

"This is what you get for not remembering that if a person is
practically a foreigner you can never expect to know them except in
spots," she admonished herself.

* * * * *

After they had driven in the Cascine and around the Viali for the
sunshine and