?"

"Because--" Orsino checked himself, almost with a start.

He was annoyed at the words which had been so near his lips, for he had
been on the point of saying "because I love you"--and he was intimately
convinced that he did not love her. He could not in the least understand
why the phrase was so ready to be spoken. Could it be, he asked himself,
that Maria Consuelo was trying to make him say the words, and that her
will, with her question, acted directly on his mind? He scouted the
thought as soon as it presented itself, not only for its absurdity, but
because it shocked some inner sensibility.

"What were you going to say?" asked Madame d'Aranjuez almost carelessly.

"Something that is best not said," he answered.

"Then I am glad you did not say it."

She spoke quietly and unaffectedly. It needed little divination on her
part to guess what the words might have been. Even if she wished them
spoken, she would not have them spoken too lightly, for she had heard
his love speeches before, when they had meant very little.

Orsino suddenly turned the subject, as though he felt unsure of himself.
He asked her about the result of her search, in the morning. She
answered that she had determined to take the apartment in the Palazzo
Barberini.

"I believe it is a very large place," observed Orsino, indifferently.

"Yes," she answered in the same tone. "I mean to receive this winter.
But it will be a tiresome affair to furnish such a wilderness."

"I suppose you mean to establish yourself in Rome for several years."
His face expressed a satisfaction of which he was hardly conscious
himself. Maria Consuelo noticed it.

"You seem pleased," she said.

"How could I possibly not be?" he asked.

Then he was silent. All his own words seemed to him to mean too much or
too little. He wished she would choose some subject of conversation and
talk that he might listen. But she also was unusually silent.

He cut his visit short, very suddenly, and left her, saying that he
hoped to find her at home as a general rule at that hour, quite
forgetting that she would naturally be always out at the cool time
towards evening.

He walked slowly homewards in the dusk, and did not remember to go to
his solitary dinner until nearly nine o'clock. He was not pleased with
himself, but he was involuntarily pleased by something he felt and would
not have been insensible to if he had been given the choice. His old
interest in Maria Consuelo