nfortunately. Still Helen found his care of her
reputation--as far as association of her name with his went--somewhat
exaggerated. She could hardly believe him to be indifferent to her, and
yet---- Oh! the whole matter was unsatisfactory, abominably
unsatisfactory--of a piece with the disquieting influences of this grim
and fateful city, with the detestable weather evident there without!

And then, suddenly, an idea came to Helen de Vallorbes, causing the
delicate colour to spring into her cheeks, and the light into her eyes,
veiled by those fringed, semitransparent lids. For, some two years
earlier, Richard Calmady had taken her husband's villa at Naples on
lease, it offering, as he said, a convenient _pied a terre_ to him
while yachting along the adjacent coasts, up the Black Sea to Odessa,
and eastward as far as Aden, and the Persian Gulf. The house, save for
the actual fabric of it, had become rather dilapidated and ruinate. To
de Vallorbes it appeared clearly advantageous to get the property off
his hands, and touch a considerable yearly sum, rather than have his
pocket drained by outgoings on a place in which he no longer cared to
live. So the Villa Vallorbes passed for the time being into Richard
Calmady's possession. It pleased his fancy. Helen heard he had restored
and refurnished it at great expenditure of money and of taste.

These facts she recalled. And, recalling them, found both the actuality
of rain-blurred, wind-scourged town without, and anger-begetting
memories of Brockhurst within, fade before a seductive vision of
sun-bathed Naples and of that nobly placed and painted villa, in
which--as it seemed to her--was just now resident promise of high
entertainment, the objective delight of abnormal circumstance, the
subjective delight of long-cherished revenge. All the rapture of her
existing freedom came back on her, while her brain, fertile in forecast
of adventure, projected scenes and situations not unworthy of the pen
of Boccaccio himself. Fired by such thoughts, she moved from the
window, stood before a tall glass at right angles to it and
contemplated her own fair reflection long and intimately. An absorbing
interest in the general effect, and in the details, of her person
possessed her. She moved to and fro observing the grace of her
carriage, the set of her hips, the slenderness of her waist. She
unfastened her soft, trailing tea-gown, throwing the loose bodice of it
back, critically examining her