see him. Florence had taught her, signally, the depths of her own
lack of culture, and this biting knowledge increased her respect for
Mr. Berkeley Hayden. Marcia was immensely clever, charmingly
cultivated, a woman of the world in the best sense, but Anne's
native shrewdness told her that Marcia's knowledge was not equal to
Hayden's. His culture was surer and deeper. He was more than a mere
amateur; he _knew_. He stood apart, in her mind, and just a little
higher than anybody else. She turned to him eagerly, and there was
established between them, almost unconsciously, the most potent,
perfect, and dangerous of all relationships, because it is the most
beautiful and natural,--that, in which the man is the teacher and
the woman the pupil.

Hayden saw her, too, to greater advantage, here under this
Florentine sky, against the background of perhaps the most beautiful
city in the world. She glowed, splendidly young and vivid. She did
not laugh often, but when she did, it was like a peal of music; it
came straight from her heart and went direct to yours. It was as
catching as fire, as exhilarating as the chime of sleigh-bells on a
frosty Thanksgiving morning, as clear and true as a redbird's
whistle; and it had tucked away in it a funny, throaty chuckle so
irresistibly infectious that suspicious old St. Anthony himself,
would have joined in accord with it, had he heard its silver echo
in his wilderness. Berkeley Hayden's immortal soul stood on the
tiptoe of ecstasy when Anne Champneys laughed.

She no longer thought of herself as Nancy Simms; she knew herself
now as Anne Champneys, a newer and better personality dominating
that old, unhappy, ignorant self. If at times the man glimpsed that
other shadowy self of hers, it was part of her mysterious appeal,
her enthralling, baffling charm. It invested her with a shade of
inscrutable, prescient sorrow, as of old unhappy far-off things. He
hadn't the faintest idea of Nancy Simms, a creature utterly foreign
to his experience. And because she did not love him, Anne Champneys
never spoke of that old self, never confided in him. He did not know
her as she had been, he only knew her as she was now. That, however,
fully satisfied his critical taste. The marvel of her alabaster
skin, fleckless and flawless, the glory of her glittering red hair,
the sea-depths of her cool, gray-green eyes, the reserve of her
expression, the virginal curve of her lip, enchanted him. He liked
the tal