as more disappointed than she remembered ever being, even as a
child, not to find him or any word from him. She did not allow it to
become later by more than half an hour before she scratched a line and
sent the coachman to his house with it.

The man came back with nothing but the barren information, received from
Giovanna, that the _signorino_ was absent, having gone to Leghorn.

"Well, here's a pretty howdydo!" thought Aurora, sore with surprise and
the smart of injury. "If every time I refuse him he's going off like
this to stay away for days and days, what am I going to do?"

CHAPTER XXIII

"If this is the way it was going to be, and I'd known it before, I'd
have kept better watch over my affections," said Aurora to herself,
reflecting upon Gerald in Leghorn, where he was bending his will
industriously, no doubt, to the work of forgetting her.

Beside the large sharp thorn of this thought, she was troubled by what
was a small, merely uncomfortable thorn: the knowledge of Gerald exposed
so closely to the influence of Vincent, that persuasive young man of
God, who bowed to images and believed in the Pope. At the end of every
wearisome day she gave thanks that for still another twenty-four hours
she had by grace of strength from on high been able to fight off the
temptation to write to Gerald.

This for nine days--the nine days it takes for a wonder to become a
commonplace or a scandal to lose its prominent place in conversation.
Then, in the way once sweetly habitual, there came a rapping at the
door, the entrance of a servant, and the announcement, "_C'e il
signorino_."

Aurora for a second either did not really grasp the import of the words
or did not trust her senses. She asked:

"What _signorino_? _Signorino_ What?"

"The _signorino_ who has come back," said the servant, unable on
the instant to recall the foreign name. And if he had felt interest in
the complexion of one so far removed from him as his mistress, he might
have seen her turn the hue of a classic sunrise.

On her way down the stairs Aurora rejected the idea of a tumultuous
reproachful greeting, such as, "Where have you been so long, you mean
thing?" Or of a cool and cutting one, such as, "You're quite a
stranger." She decided to behave like a nice person, and show respect
for her friend's freedom, after having so explicitly left it to him.

The Italians performing the service of the house arranged it according
to their own ideas