to
show everybody that you own a man, so to say."

Mrs. Bowring seemed to be considering the question, but she evidently
found nothing more to say about it, and they walked up and down in
silence for a long time, each occupied with her own thoughts. Then all
at once there was a sound of many voices speaking English, and trying to
give orders in Italian, and the words "Good-bye, Brook!" sounded several
times above the rest. Little by little, all grew still again.

"They are gone at last," said Mrs. Bowring, with a sigh of relief.

CHAPTER III

Clare Bowring went to her room that night feeling as though she had been
at the theatre. She could not get rid of the impression made upon her by
the scene she had witnessed, and over and over again, as she lay awake,
with the moonbeams streaming into her room, she went over all she had
seen and heard on the platform. It had, at least, been very like the
theatre. The broad, flat stage, the somewhat conventionally picturesque
buildings, the strip of far-off sea, as flat as a band of paint, the
unnaturally bright moonlight, the two chief figures going through a love
quarrel in the foreground, and she herself calmly seated in the shadow,
as in the darkened amphitheatre, and looking on unseen and unnoticed.

But the two people had not talked at all as people talked on the stage
in any piece Clare had ever seen. What would have been the "points" in a
play had all been left out, and instead there had been abrupt pauses and
awkward silences, and then, at what should have been the supreme moment,
the lady in white had asked for a cigarette. And the two hasty little
kisses that had a sort of perfunctory air, and the queer, jerky
"good-byes," and the last stop near the door of the hotel--it all had an
air of being very badly done. It could not have been a success on the
stage, Clare thought.

And yet this was a bit of life, of the real, genuine life of two people
who had been in love, and perhaps were in love still, though they might
not know it. She had been present at what must, in her view, have been a
great crisis in two lives. Such things, she thought, could not happen
more than once in a lifetime--twice, perhaps. Her mother had been
married twice, so Clare admitted a second possibility. But not more than
that.

The situation, too, as she reviewed it, was nothing short of romantic.
Here was a young man who had evidently been making love to a married
woman, and who had m