ised his shoulders just perceptibly. "I reproach myself with
having allowed you to be so much alone. It must have been awfully dull
for you."

"It was a little dull," Helen said, still gently.

"I ought to have begged you to ask some of the people you know in
Naples to come here. It was stupid of me not to think of it. I need not
have seen them, neither need they have seen me."

He looked at her steadily again, as though trying to fix her image in
his memory.

"Yes, it was stupid of me," he repeated absently. "But I have got into
churlish, bachelor habits--that can hardly be helped, living alone, or
on board ship, as I do--and I have pretty well forgotten how to provide
adequately for the entertainment of a guest."

"Oh! I have had that which I wanted, that which I came for," Helen
answered, very charmingly,--"had it in part, at all events. Though I
could have put up with just a little more of it, Dickie, perhaps."

"I warned you, if you remember, that opportunities of amusement--as
that word is generally understood--would be limited."

"Amusement?" she exclaimed, with an almost tragic inflection of
contempt.

"Oh yes!" he said, "amusement is not to be despised. I'd give all I am
worth, half my time, to be amused--but that again, like hospitality, is
rather a lost art with me. You remember, I warned you life at the villa
in these days was not precisely hilarious."

Helen clapped her hands together.

"Ah! you are wilfully obtuse, you are wilfully, cruelly pigheaded!" she
cried. "Pardon me, dear Richard, but your attitude is enough to
exasperate a saint. And I am no saint as yet. I am still
human--radically, for my own peace of mind lamentably, human. I am only
too capable of being grieved, humiliated, hurt. But there, it is folly
to say such things to you! You are hopelessly insensible to all that.
So I take refuge in quoting your own words of this morning against
you--that no explanation is lucid if the hearer refuses to accept it."

"I am dull, no doubt, but honestly I fail to see how that remark of
mine can be held to apply in the present case."

"It applies quite desolatingly well!" Helen declared, with spirit. Then
her manner softened into a seductiveness of forgiveness once
again.--"And so, dear Richard, I am glad that I had already determined
to leave here to-morrow. It would have been a little too wretched to
arrive at that determination after this conversation. You must go alone
to hear your old f