"Casa Felice!"

She laughed.

"To be sure; I was to baptise it, wasn't I?"

"Ah, that--will you have it for a while?"

"But you are going there!"

"I will not go. It is all ready. The servants are engaged. You will
be perfectly looked after, perfectly comfortable. Let me feel I can do
something for you. Try it. You will find beauty there--peace. And I--I
shall be on the lake, not far off."

"I must be alone," she said wearily.

"You shall be. I will never come unless you send for me."

"I should never send for you or for anyone."

She did not say then what she would do, but three days later she
accepted Sir Donald's offer.

And now she was alone in Casa Felice. She had not even brought her
French maid, but had engaged an Italian. She was resolved to isolate
herself with people who had never seen her as a beautiful woman.

CHAPTER XIX

LADY HOLME never forgot that first evening at Casa Felice. The
strangeness of it was greater than the strangeness of any nightmare.
When she was shut up in her bedroom in London she had thought she
realised all the meaning of the word loneliness. Now she knew that then
she had not begun to realise it. For she had been in her own house, in
the city which contained a troop of her friends, in the city where she
had reigned. And although she knew that she would reign no more, she had
not grasped the exact meaning of that knowledge in London. She had known
a fact but not fully felt it. She had known what she now was but not
fully felt what she now was. Even when Fritz, muttering almost terrified
exclamations, had stumbled out of the bedroom, she had not heard the
dull clamour of finality as she heard it now.

She was an exile. She was an outcast among women. She was no longer
a beautiful woman, she was not even a plain woman--she was a
dreadful-looking human being.

The Italian servants by whom she was surrounded suddenly educated her in
the lore of exact knowledge of herself and her present situation.

Italians are the most charming of the nations, but Italians of the lower
classes are often very unreserved in the display of their most fugitive
sensations, their most passing moods. The men, especially when they are
young, are highly susceptible to beauty in women. They are also--and
the second emotion springs naturally enough from the first--almost
childishly averse from female ugliness. It is a common thing in Italy
to hear of men of the lower classes speak of a woman's