t the fair the
day you arrived! Why--why didn't you tell me? Why didn't you write?"

"You didn't know, then!"

The words came very quickly, very eagerly.

"Know! Didn't Lucrezia tell you that we had no idea?"

"Poor Lucrezia! She's in a dreadful condition. I found her in the
village."

"No!" Maurice cried, thankful to turn the conversation from himself,
though only for an instant. "I specially told her to stay here. I
specially----"

"Well, but, poor thing, as you weren't expecting me! But I wrote,
Maurice, I wrote a letter telling you everything, the hour we were
coming--"

"It's Don Paolo!" exclaimed Gaspare, angrily. "He hides away the letters.
He lets them lie sometimes in his office for months. To-morrow I will go
and tell him what I think; I will turn out every drawer."

"It is too bad!" Maurice said.

"Then you never had it?"

"Hermione"--he stared at the open door--"you think we should have gone to
the fair if----"

"No, no, I never thought so. I only wondered. It all seemed so strange."

"It is too horrible!" Maurice said, with heavy emphasis. "And Artois--no
rooms ready for him! What can he have thought?"

"As I did, that there had been a mistake. What does it matter now? Just
at the moment I was dreadfully--oh, dreadfully disappointed. I saw
Gaspare at the fair. And you saw me, Gaspare?"

"Si, signora. I ran all the way to the station, but the train had gone."

"But I didn't see you, Maurice. Where were you?"

Gaspare opened his lips to speak, but Maurice did not give him time.

"I was there, too, in the fair."

"But of course you weren't looking at the train?"

"Of course not. And when Gaspare told me, it was too late to do anything.
We couldn't get back in time, and the donkeys were tired, and so----"

"Oh, I'm glad you didn't hurry back. What good would it have done then?"

There was a touch of constraint in her voice.

"You must have thought I should be in bed."

"Yes, we did."

"And so I ought to be now. I believe I am tremendously tired, but--but
I'm so tremendously something else that I hardly know."

The constraint had gone.

"The signora is happy because she is back in my country," Gaspare
remarked, with pride and an air of shrewdness.

He nodded his head. The faded roses shook above his ears. Hermione smiled
at him.

"He knows all about it," she said. "Well, if we are ever to go to
bed----"

Gaspare looked from her to his padrone.

"Buona notte, signora," he s