in getting back to the hotel. Theatres were over; suppers
were being eaten in the Louis Seize restaurant, into which Angela could
see as she got into the lift; and upstairs shoes had already been put
outside bedroom doors. In front of the one next her own, she saw two pairs
which made her smile a little, for, though she could not be certain, she
fancied that she recognized them. One pair was stout, unfashionable, made
for country wear; the other looked several sizes smaller, glittered with
the uncompromising newness of patent leather, and was ultra "smart" in
shape.

"Poor statue!" she said to herself. "If they're his, how dreadfully the
new ones must have hurt him!"

Then she went into her own room, where Kate presently came to undress her
with affectionate if inexperienced hands.

Angela was still excited by all the events of the day, her first in her
own country since childhood, and fancied that she would not be able to
sleep. But soon she forgot everything and lay dead to the world, very
still, very white in the light that stole through the window, very
beautiful, drowned in the waves of her hair. Then, at last, she began to
dream of Italy; that she was there; that she had never come away; and that
there was no escape. She moaned faintly in her sleep, and roused herself
enough to know that she was dreaming; tried to wake and succeeded,
breathing hard after her fight to conquer the dream.

"It's not true!" she told herself, pressing her face caressingly against
the pillow because it was an American pillow, not an Italian one in the
Palazzo di Sereno, and because it made her feel safe.

So she lay for a minute or two, comforting herself with the thought that
all bad and frightening things were left behind in the past, with a door,
double-locked by a golden key, shut forever between it and her. Nothing
disagreeable could happen now. And she was falling asleep once more, when
a slight noise made her heart jump. Then she and her heart both kept very
still, for it seemed that the noise was in the room, not far from her bed.

It came again, and Angela realized that it was at one of the two windows,
both of which were open.

At her request, Kate had pulled the dark blinds halfway up, and Angela
would have laughed at the suggestion that a thief could creep into a room
on the twelfth story. Nevertheless, the night glow of the great city
silhouetted the figure of a man black against the shining of the
half-raised windo