nd by, approaching footsteps became audible in the
stone-floored corridor without, Beatrice hastily shut the book, thrust
it back upon the table, and caught up another so that Emilia Manfredi,
entering, found her reading Monsieur Anatole France's "Etui de nacre."

"Emilia," she said, "I wish you would translate the I Jongleur de Notre
Dame' into Italian."

XXII

Peter, we may suppose, returned to Villa Floriano that afternoon in a
state of some excitement.

"He ought to have told her--"

"It was her right to be told--"

"What could her rank matter--"

"A gentleman can offer his hand to any woman--"

"She would have despised the conventional barriers--"

"No woman could be proof against such a compliment--"

"The case was peculiar--ordinary rules could not apply to it--"

"Every man gets the wife he deserves--and he had certainly gone a long
way towards deserving her--"

"He should simply have told her the story of his book and of her part in
it--he need n't have mentioned love--she would have understood--"

The Duchessa's voice, clear and cool and crisp-cut, sounded perpetually
in his ears; the words she had spoken, the arguments she had urged,
repeated and repeated themselves, danced round and round, in his memory.

"Ought I to have told her--then and there? Shall I go to her and tell
her to-morrow?"

He tried to think; but he could not think. His faculties were in a
whirl--he could by no means command them. He could only wait, inert,
while the dance went on. It was an extremely riotous dance. The
Duchessa's conversation was reproduced without sequence, without
coherence--scattered fragments of it were flashed before him fitfully,
in swift disorder. If he would attempt to seize upon one of those
fragments, to detain and fix it, for consideration--a speech of hers,
a look, an inflection--then the whole experience suddenly lost its
outlines, his recollection of it became a jumble, and he was left, as it
were, intellectually gasping.

He walked about his garden, he went into the house, he came out, he
walked about again, he went in and dressed for dinner, he sat on his
rustic bench, he smoked cigarette after cigarette.

"Ought I to have told her? Ought I to tell her to-morrow?"

At moments there would come a lull in the turmoil, an interval of quiet,
of apparent clearness; and the answer would seem perfectly plain.

"Of course, you ought to tell her. Tell her--and all will be well. She
ha