st
tell me about that."

And just at this crisis the Cardinal and Emilia appeared, climbing the
terrace steps.

"Bother!" exclaimed the Duchessa, under her breath. Then, to Peter, "It
will have to be for another time--unless I die of the suspense."

After the necessary greetings were transacted, another elderly priest
joined the company; a tall, burly, rather florid man, mentioned, when
Peter was introduced to him, as Monsignor Langshawe. "This really is her
chaplain," Peter concluded. Then a servant brought tea.

"Ah, Diamond, Diamond, you little know what mischief you might have
wrought," he admonished himself, as he walked home through the level
sunshine. "In another instant, if we'd not been interrupted, you would
have let the cat out of the bag. The premature escape of the cat from
the bag would spoil everything."

And he hugged himself, as one snatched from peril, in a qualm of
retroactive terror. At the same time he was filled with a kind of
exultancy. All that he had hoped had come to pass, and more, vastly
more. Not only had he been received as a friend at Ventirose, but he had
been encouraged to tell her a part at least of the story by which her
life and his were so curiously connected; and he had been snatched from
the peril of telling her too much. The day was not yet when he could
safely say, "Mutato nomine....." Would the day ever be? But, meanwhile,
just to have told her the first ten lines of that story, he could not
help feeling, somehow advanced matters tremendously, somehow put a new
face on matters.

"The hour for which the ages sighed may not be so far away as you
think," he said to Marietta. "The curtain has risen upon Act Three. I
fancy I can perceive faint glimmerings of the beginning of the end."

XIX

All that evening, something which he had not been conscious of noticing
especially when it was present to him--certainly he had paid no
conscious attention to its details--kept recurring and recurring to
Peter's memory: the appearance of the prettily-arranged terrace-end at
Ventirose: the white awning, with the blue sky at its edges, the sunny
park beyond; the warm-hued carpets on the marble pavement; the wicker
chairs, with their bright cushions; the table, with its books and
bibelots--the yellow French books, a tortoise-shell paperknife, a silver
paperweight, a crystal smelling-bottle, a bowlful of drooping poppies;
and the marble balustrade, with its delicate tracery of leav