hould, I'd want to be on the spot to give them a welcome. I
wouldn't miss them for the world."

"The Contessa will be disappointed," said the Boy slowly.

"Oh no, I don't think so; and if she is, a little, you will easily
console her."

"If I had dreamed that you wouldn't----" The Boy began his sentence
hastily, then cut it as quickly short.

I opened the gate. We passed in together, Joseph remaining outside
according to my directions, keeping Fanny-anny as well as Finois,
while Innocentina followed the Boy with the pack-donkey.

A turn in the path brought us suddenly upon a lawn, surrounded with
shrubbery which at first had hidden it from our view. There, under a
huge crimson umbrella, rising flowerlike by its long slender stem from
the smooth-shaven grass, sat four persons in basket chairs, round a
small tea table. Gaeta, in green as pale as Undine's draperies, sprang
up with a glad little cry to greet us. The Baron and Baronessa smiled
bleak "society smiles," and a handsome, fair young man frankly glared.

Evidently this was the great Paolo, master of the air and ships that
sail therein; and as evidently he had heard of us.

Now I knew what the Baron had meant when he said to his wife:
"Something _shall_ happen, my dear." He had telegraphed a
danger-signal to Paolo, and Paolo had lost not a moment in responding.
This looked as if Paolo meant business in deadly earnest, where the
Contessa was concerned; for how many dinners and medals must he not
have missed in Paris, how many important persons in the air-world must
he not have offended, by breaking his engagements in the hope of
making one here?

He was fair, with a Latin fairness, this famous young man. There was
nothing Saxon or Anglo-Saxon about him. No one could possibly bestow
him--in a guess--upon any other country than his native Italy. He was
thirty-one or two perhaps, long-limbed and wolfishly spare, like his
elder brother, whom he resembled thus only. He had an eagle nose,
prominent red lips, sulky and sensuous, a fine though narrow forehead
under brown hair cut _en brosse_, a shade darker than the small, waxed
moustache and pointed beard. His brows turned up slightly at the outer
corners, and his heavy-lidded, tobacco-coloured eyes were bold,
insolent, and passionate at the same time.

This was the man who wished to marry butterfly Gaeta, and who had come
on the wings of the wind, in an airship "shod with fire," or in the
_train de luxe_, to def