ntimately breast
to breast with the vastness of air and lake. Stresa lay behind them, a
tangle of yellow sparks. The Barromean Islands brooded sleeping on their
shadows. Pallanza was a faint spangle to the left. Far away in front,
towards Switzerland, what seemed a silvery mist shaped like mountains,
floated against the pearl dust of the sky.

Sophy leaned towards him suddenly. Her eyes looked dark and mysterious
under her white, moonlit brow.

"Need we go quite so fast?" she said. "It seems a pity to hurry through
such beauty."

Her obvious faith in him gave him joy and pain at the same time. If she
had felt one hundredth part for him what he felt for her, she could not
have suggested so simply a thing that meant their being longer together.
He set the engine to a slower speed. They had passed Pallanza, and were
running near enough the shore to see the ghostly loveliness of white
roses and oleanders pouring above the walls of villa gardens. Where the
shore was wild and overgrown, tangles of honeysuckle showered them with
voluptuous fragrance. Above, on the hills, the little villages shone in
the moonlight, like handfuls of scattered mica.

Now they had passed Intra. The dark foliage of the Villa Bianca came
into view. They could see the colonnade of its old eucalyptus trees,
above the retaining-wall of granite.

"Oh, why should such lovely hours have to end--when they need not,"
sighed Sophy. "I hate convention when it lops off such hours as these
like a grudging old Procrustes. Don't you hate the sheer tyranny of
convention, Marchese?"

"Indeed--yes," said Amaldi.

Glancing back at their evening together, as he spoke, Sophy thought that
he had been unusually taciturn. He was not a talkative man, but it
really seemed to her, now that she thought of it, that he had been
almost oddly silent most of the time. She wondered if he were worried
about something.

High up above the thirty-foot retaining-wall, behind its palms and
pollard acacias, the chalet was pouring forth a stream of light from its
open door. The faithful Luigi was evidently sitting up for her.

Amaldi stepped out and held out his hand to her. Sophy was close to
Amaldi on the narrow plank of the _banchetta_. That look in his face
hurt her. Then his eyes turned suddenly away.

"Thank your mother for me, please, Marchese," she said, "for the lovely
day she gave me, and for lending me her cloak."

She slipped it from her shoulders as she spoke and