the
means to go even to a third-rate place. As for Cannes it is impossible.
I told you so before we came here. Rome is impossible--the apartment is
let, and without that I could not live at all. Everything is gone. Here
one may manage to exist a little while, for the house is good, and Sir
Tom is rather amusing. But how to get to London unless they will take us
I know not, and London is the place to produce you, Bice. It is for that
I have been working. But Milady does not like me; she is jealous of me,
and if she can she will send us away. Is it wonderful, then, that I am
glad you are her friend? I am very glad of it, and I should wish you to
let her know that to no one could she give her money more fitly. You
see," said the Contessa, with a smile, resuming her seat and her easy
tone, "I have come back to the point we started from. It is seldom one
does that so naturally. If it is true (which seems so impossible) that
there is money to give away, no one has a better right to it than you."

Bice went away from this interview with a mind more disturbed than it
had ever been in her life before. Naturally, the novel circumstances
which surrounded her awakened deeper questions as her mind developed,
and she began to find herself a distinct personage. They set her
wondering. Madame di Forno-Populo had been of a tenderness unparalleled
to this girl, and had sheltered her existence ever since she could
remember. It had not occurred to her mind as yet to ask what the
relations were between them, or why she had been the object of so much
affection and thought. She had accepted this with all the composure of a
child ever since she was a child. And the prospect of achieving a
marriage should she turn out beautiful, and thus being in a position to
return some of the kindness shown her, seemed to Bice the most natural
thing in the world. But the change of atmosphere had done something, and
Lucy's company, and the growth, perhaps, of her own young spirit. She
went away troubled. There seemed to be more in the world and its
philosophy than Bice's simple rules could explain.

CHAPTER XXVIII.

THE SERPENT AND THE DOVE.

On the very next day after this conversation took place a marked change
occurred in the manner of the Contessa. She had been always caressing to
Lucy, calling her by pretty names, and using a hundred tender
expressions as if to a child; but had never pretended to talk to her
otherwise than in a condescending