er-in-law to marry an angel?"

"Mr. Herriton, don't--please, Mr. Herriton--a dentist. His father's a
dentist."

Philip gave a cry of personal disgust and pain. He shuddered all over,
and edged away from his companion. A dentist! A dentist at Monteriano. A
dentist in fairyland! False teeth and laughing gas and the tilting
chair at a place which knew the Etruscan League, and the Pax Romana,
and Alaric himself, and the Countess Matilda, and the Middle Ages, all
fighting and holiness, and the Renaissance, all fighting and beauty! He
thought of Lilia no longer. He was anxious for himself: he feared that
Romance might die.

Romance only dies with life. No pair of pincers will ever pull it out of
us. But there is a spurious sentiment which cannot resist the unexpected
and the incongruous and the grotesque. A touch will loosen it, and the
sooner it goes from us the better. It was going from Philip now, and
therefore he gave the cry of pain.

"I cannot think what is in the air," he began. "If Lilia was determined
to disgrace us, she might have found a less repulsive way. A boy of
medium height with a pretty face, the son of a dentist at Monteriano.
Have I put it correctly? May I surmise that he has not got one penny?
May I also surmise that his social position is nil? Furthermore--"

"Stop! I'll tell you no more."

"Really, Miss Abbott, it is a little late for reticence. You have
equipped me admirably!"

"I'll tell you not another word!" she cried, with a spasm of terror.
Then she got out her handkerchief, and seemed as if she would shed
tears. After a silence, which he intended to symbolize to her the
dropping of a curtain on the scene, he began to talk of other subjects.

They were among olives again, and the wood with its beauty and wildness
had passed away. But as they climbed higher the country opened out, and
there appeared, high on a hill to the right, Monteriano. The hazy green
of the olives rose up to its walls, and it seemed to float in isolation
between trees and sky, like some fantastic ship city of a dream. Its
colour was brown, and it revealed not a single house--nothing but the
narrow circle of the walls, and behind them seventeen towers--all that
was left of the fifty-two that had filled the city in her prime. Some
were only stumps, some were inclining stiffly to their fall, some were
still erect, piercing like masts into the blue. It was impossible to
praise it as beautiful, but it was also impossible t