"It's a good room to think in, or to be sad in."

He struck a match on his boot.

"You like to shut out London," he continued.

"Yes. Yet I live in it."

"And hate it. So do I. London's like a black-browed brute that gets an
unholy influence over you. It would turn Mark Tapley into an Ibsen man.
Yet one can't get away from it."

"It holds interesting minds and interesting faces."

"Didn't Persia?"

"Lethargy dwells there and in all Eastern lands."

"You have made up your mind to spend the rest of your days in the fog?"

"No. Indeed, only to-day I acquired a Campo Santo with cypress trees, in
which I intend to make a home for any dying romance that still lingers
within me."

He spoke with a sort of wistful whimsicality. Carey stared hard at him.

"A Campo Santo's a place for the dead."

"Why not for the dying? Don't they need holy ground as much?"

"And where's this holy ground of yours?"

Sir Donald got up from his chair, went over to the bureau, opened a
drawer, and took out of it a large photograph rolled round a piece of
wood, which he handed to Carey, who swiftly spread it out on his knees.

"That is it."

"I say, Sir Donald, d'you mind my asking for a whisky-and-soda?"

"I beg your pardon."

He hastily touched a bell and ordered it. Meanwhile Carey examined the
photograph.

"What do you think of it?" Sir Donald asked.

"Well--Italy obviously."

"Yes, and a conventional part of Italy."

"Maggiore?"

"No, Como."

"The playground of the honeymoon couple."

"Not where my Campo Santo is. They go to Cadenabbia, Bellagio, Villa
D'Este sometimes."

"I see the fascination. But it looks haunted. You've bought it?"

"Yes. The matter was arranged to-day."

The photograph showed a large, long house, or rather two houses divided
by a piazza with slender columns. In the foreground was water. Through
the arches of the piazza water was also visible, a cascade falling in
the black cleft of a mountain gorge dark with the night of cypresses.
To the right of the house, rising from the lake, was a tall old wall
overgrown with masses of creeping plants and climbing roses. Over it
more cypresses looked, and at the base of it, near the house, were a
flight of worn steps disappearing into the lake, and an arched doorway
with an elaborately-wrought iron grille. Beneath the photograph was
written, "_Casa Felice_."

"Casa Felice, h'm!" said Carey, with his eyes on the photograph.

"You think the name