ng that perhaps
they might have gone up to the fountain of Neptune, began to climb the
hill. She asked an old man who was coming down from there if he had
seen two young ladies, one dressed in red.

"No, signorina."

She hurried back to the arena and spoke to a woman there. "Have you
seen a young lady in red with black curls?"

She answered readily: "_Sicuro!_ She went towards the Porta Romana
half an hour ago. I think the other signorina was leaving and she
wished to accompany her a part of the way. There was an older person
with them."

Olive's relief was only momentary; it sounded well, but one might walk
to the Porta Romana and back twice in the time. Soon the gates would
be closed, and if she had not found Mamie then, and the gardeners made
her leave with the others, what should she do? She suspected a trick.
The girl had a mischievous and impish humour that delighted in the
infliction of small hurts, and she might have gone home, happy in the
thought that her governess would get a "wigging," or she might be
hiding about somewhere to give her a fright.

Olive went up the steep path towards the Belvedere, hoping to find her
there. That part of the garden was not much frequented, and the white
bodies and uplifted arms of the marble gods gleamed ghostly and
forlorn in the dusk of the ilex woods that lay between the
amphitheatre and the gate.

She went on until she saw a glimmer of red through the close-woven
branches. Mamie was there in the dark wood, and she was not alone. A
man was with her, and he was holding her easily, as if he knew she
would not go yet, and laughing as she stood on tiptoe to reach the
fine cruel lips that touched hers presently, when he chose that they
should.

Olive turned and ran up the path to the top of the hill, and there she
stood for a while, trying to get her breath, trying to be calm, and
sane and tolerant, to see no harm where perhaps there was none after
all. And yet the treachery and the deceit were so flagrant that surely
no condonation was possible. She felt sick of men and women, and of
life itself, since the greatest thing in it seemed to be this
hateful, miscalled love that preceded sorrow and shame and death. Was
love always loathsome to look upon? Not in pictures or on the stage,
where it was represented as a kind of minuet in which the man makes
graceful advances to a woman who smiles as she draws away, but in real
life--

"Not real love," she said to herself. "Oh