next, I wonder?" He jammed his hat down on
his head and walked out into the sun-blaze.

As he was turning away from the square by the general Post Office, a
white parasol waved from a passing cab, and Coral Hicks leaned forward
with outstretched hand. "I knew I'd find you," she triumphed. "I've
been driving up and down in this broiling sun for hours, shopping and
watching for you at the same time."

He stared at her blankly, too bewildered even to wonder how she knew he
was in Genoa; and she continued, with the kind of shy imperiousness that
always made him feel, in her presence, like a member of an orchestra
under a masterful baton; "Now please get right into this carriage, and
don't keep me roasting here another minute." To the cabdriver she called
out: "Al porto."

Nick Lansing sank down beside her. As he did so he noticed a heap of
bundles at her feet, and felt that he had simply added one more to the
number. He supposed that she was taking her spoils to the Ibis, and
that he would be carried up to the deck-house to be displayed with the
others. Well, it would all help to pass the day--and by night he would
have reached some kind of a decision about his future.

On the third day after Nick's departure the post brought to the Palazzo
Vanderlyn three letters for Mrs. Lansing.

The first to arrive was a word from Strefford, scribbled in the train
and posted at Turin. In it he briefly said that he had been called home
by the dreadful accident of which Susy had probably read in the daily
papers. He added that he would write again from England, and then--in
a blotted postscript--: "I wanted uncommonly badly to see you for
good-bye, but the hour was impossible. Regards to Nick. Do write me just
a word to Altringham."

The other two letters, which came together in the afternoon, were both
from Genoa. Susy scanned the addresses and fell upon the one in her
husband's writing. Her hand trembled so much that for a moment she could
not open the envelope. When she had done so, she devoured the letter in
a flash, and then sat and brooded over the outspread page as it lay on
her knee. It might mean so many things--she could read into it so
many harrowing alternatives of indifference and despair, of irony and
tenderness! Was he suffering tortures when he wrote it, or seeking
only to inflict them upon her? Or did the words represent his actual
feelings, no more and no less, and did he really intend her to
understand that he co