my love for Vanno and his love for me."

Marie bent down suddenly, seized Mary's hand, and kissed it.

"Thank you," she said. "Now I can be at peace, for a little while. Now I
can be glad that you're engaged to Vanno. And we may see each other, and
all four be happy together. The ordeal's over."

XXIX

In a few days most of the people between Nice and Mentone who had been
interested in the beautiful and rather mysterious Mary Grant knew that
she was engaged to marry Prince Giovanni Della Robbia, a son of the
Roman Duke di Rienzi.

Many of them, especially the women, said that she was very lucky,
probably a great deal luckier than she deserved; and all the gossip
about her which had been a favourite tea-time topic, before her losses
at the Casino began to make her a bore, was revived again. The
self-satisfied mother and bird-like girl who had travelled with her in
the Paris train had a great deal to say. They wondered "if the poor
Prince _knew_; but of course he couldn't know. He was simply infatuated.
Very sad. He was such a handsome young man, so noble looking, and so, in
a way, _historic_. A million times too good for Miss Grant, even if
there were nothing against her. Of course, he had gambled too: but then
everything was so different for a man."

They talked so much that the mother's bridge friends, and the girl's
tennis friends, and the dwellers in villas who, for one cause or
another, had admitted Mrs. and Miss Cayley-Binns to the great honour of
"luncheon-terms" or the lesser honour of "tea-terms," asked them for
particulars. Facts were demanded at a luncheon given for the purpose by
Lady Meason, whose husband had once been Lord Mayor of London. This lady
had gone to bed and stopped there for a month at the end of Sir Henry's
year of office, in sheer chagrin that "Othello's occupation" was gone,
and her crown of glory set upon another's head, while she must retire to
the obscurity of Bayswater. Being threatened with acute melancholia, a
specialist had advised a change of air; and Lady Meason had begun once
more to blossom like a rose--of the fully developed, cabbage order--in
the joy of being "one of the most notable, popular and successful
hostesses of the season at Mentone." She had bought several hundred
copies of a Riviera paper which described her in this manner, and sent
them to all the people who had cooled to her at the end of Sir Henry's
Great Year; and living on her new reputation, she gav