had not been
there before, and the lower lids were swollen.

"It is nothing," she answered, and then laughed nervously. "I am glad
you have made your stepfather go away. It was time! I was afraid you
were as good friends as ever."

"We have not been on good terms since we parted in Pontresina. Do you
remember when I left him in your sitting-room at the hotel? He had been
trying to persuade me to go back to Paris with him at once. In fact--"
he hesitated.

"You intended to go," Aurora said, completing the sentence. "And then
you changed your mind."

"Yes. I could not do it. I cannot explain everything."

"I understand without any explanation. I think you did right."

She went back to the fireplace and sat down in the corner of the sofa,
leaning far back and stretching out one foot to the fender in an
unconscious attitude of perfect grace. In the grey afternoon the
firelight began to play in her auburn hair. Now and then she glanced at
Marcello with half-closed lids, and there was a suggestion of a smile on
her lips. Marcello saw that in her way she was as beautiful as Regina,
and he remembered how they had kissed, without a word, when the moon's
rays quivered through the trees by the Roman shore, more than two years
ago. They had been children then. All at once he felt a great longing to
kneel down beside the sofa and throw his arms round her waist and kiss
her once again; but at almost the same instant he thought of Regina,
waiting for him by the window over there in Trastevere, and he felt the
shame rising to his face; and he leaned back in his low chair, clasping
his hands tightly over one knee, as if to keep himself from moving.

"Marcello," Aurora began presently, but she got no further.

"Yes?" Still he did not move.

"I have something on my conscience." She laughed low. "No, it is
serious!" she went on, as if reproving herself. "I have always felt that
everything that has happened to you since we parted that morning by the
shore has been my fault."

"Why?" Marcello seemed surprised.

"Because I called you a baby," she said. "If you had not been angry at
that, if you had not turned away and left me suddenly--you were quite
right, you know--you would not have been knocked down, you would not
have wandered away and lost yourself. You would not have lost your
memory, or been ill in a strange place, or--or all the rest! So it is
all my fault, you see, from beginning to end."

"How absurd!" Marcello look