alk with Monsieur Emile. Pretty, delicate, yet strong-fibred
ambitions were stirring within her, and the curious passion to use life
as a material, but not all of life that presented itself to her. With
the desire to use that might be greedy arose the fastidious prerogative
of rejection.

And that very morning, mentally, Vere had rejected the Marchesino as
something not interesting in life, something that was only lively, like
the very shallow stream. What a bore it would be having to entertain
him, to listen to his compliments, to avoid his glances, to pretend to
be at ease with him.

"But Madre can have him for a little first," she said to herself, as she
looked into the glass to see that her hair was presentable. "Madre asked
him to come. I didn't. I shall have nothing to say to him."

She had quite forgotten her eagerness on the night of the storm, when
she heard the cry of the siren that betokened his approach. Again she
looked in the glass and gave a pat to her hair. And just as she was
doing it she thought of that day after the bathe, when Gaspare had come
to tell her that Monsieur Emile was waiting for her. She had run down,
then, just as she was, and now--

"Mamma mia! Am I getting vain!" she said to herself.

And she turned from the glass, and reluctantly went to meet their guest.

She had said to herself that it was a bore having the Marchesino to
lunch, that he was uninteresting, frivolous, empty-headed. But directly
she set eyes upon him, as he stood in the drawing-room by her mother,
she felt a change in him. What had happened to him? She could not tell.
But she was conscious that he seemed much more definite, much more of
a personage, than he had seemed to her before. Even his face looked
different, though paler, stronger. She was aware of surprise.

The Marchesino, too, though much less instinctively observant than Vere,
noted a change in her. She looked more developed, more grown up. And he
said to himself:

"When I told Emile she was a woman I was right."

Their meeting was rather grave and formal, even a little stiff.
The Marchesino paid Vere two or three compliments, and she inquired
perfunctorily after his health, and expressed regret for his slight
illness.

"It was only a chill, Signorina. It was nothing."

"Perhaps you caught it that night," Vere said.

"What night, Signorina?"

Vere had been thinking of the night when he sang for her in vain.
Suddenly remembering how she and Mons