inappropriate?"

"Who knows? One can be wretched among sunbeams. One might be gay among
cypresses. And Casa Felice belongs to you?"

"From to-day."

"Old--of course?"

"Yes. There is a romance connected with the house."

"What is it?"

"Long ago two guilty lovers deserted their respective mates and the
brilliant world they had figured in, and fled there together."

"And quarrelled and were generally wretched there for how many months?"

"For eight years."

"The devil! Fidelity gone mad!"

"It is said that during those years the mistress never left the garden,
except to plunge into the lake on moonlight nights and swim through the
silver with her lover."

Carey was silent. He did not take his eyes from the photograph,
which seemed to fascinate him. When the servant came in with the
whisky-and-soda he started.

"Not a place to be alone in," he said.

He drank, and stared again at the photograph.

"There's something about the place that holds one even in a photograph,"
he added.

"One can feel the strange intrigue that made the house a hermitage. It
has been a hermitage ever since."

"Ah!"

"An old Italian lady, very rich, owned it, but never lived there. She
recently died, and her heir consented to sell it to me."

"Well, I should like to see it in the flesh--or the bricks and mortar.
But it's not a place to be alone in," repeated Carey. "It wants a woman
if ever a house did."

"What sort of woman?"

Sir Donald had sat down again on the chair opposite, and was looking
with his exhausted eyes through the smoke of the cigars at Carey.

"A fair woman, a woman with a white face, a slim woman with eyes that
are cords to draw men to her and bind them to her, and a voice that can
sing them into the islands of the sirens."

"Are there such women in a world that has forgotten Ulysses?"

"Don't you know it?"

He rolled the photograph round the piece of wood and laid it on a table.

"I can only think of one who at all answers to your description."

"The one of whom I was thinking."

"Lady Holme?"

"Of course."

"Don't you think she would be dreadfully bored in Casa Felice?"

"Horribly, horribly. Unless--"

"Unless?"

"Who knows what? But there's very often an unless hanging about, like
a man at a street corner, that--" He broke off, then added abruptly,
"Invite me to Casa Felice some day."

"I do."

"When will you be going there?"

"As soon as the London season is over. Some time in A