She chipped the top off his egg and cut finger sizes of bread for him, so that he might have it in the foreign way he preferred.

While he languidly ate, yet with pleasure, the door softly swung inward, revealing faces of women,--Estelle, Clotilde, Livvy, Giovanna,--all equally kind, all craning for the delight of a peep at him eating his soft-boiled egg.

Because he was still weak, tears came into his eyes, and because he could not permit them to be seen, he waved and haggardly smiled toward the smiling and nodding faces without inviting them nearer.

Women! women!... What a great deal of room they had occupied in his life! How much he owed them for affection,--mother, sister, servant-girl, friends....

He had known from whispers and rustlings, from a sort of instinct, latterly from Giovanna's own lips, that his house since the coming of "that lady" to undertake the government of his sickroom had been full of people, making practical and easy the carrying out of her plots.

Abundance of people and abundance of money. Old Giovanna grumbled bitterly at this invasion, but she did it inside of herself, sanely recognizing that she had subject for grat.i.tude. Her hot dark eye looked all she thought, and her lips moved as she soundlessly said all she felt; but when she dropped into the dark church of Santa Maria degli Angeli for a moment's devotion she did not fail to ask Maria to bless "that lady" and give her great good. After which she begged Her by the seven swords of Her sorrow to hasten the day that should clear the house of the whole horde of strangers, and permit her to resume the quiet life with her signorino.

Gerald, whose nature felt the oppression of material benefits as much as Giovanna felt jealousy with regard to her rights and loves, resolved that the sole seemly return for generosity in this case would be an equal generosity, consisting in an acceptance pure of every shadow, either of obligation, or reserve, or regret.

Since the doctor said it would do the invalid no harm to admit a visitor or two, Aurora wrote to Mrs. Foss. She came at once with Leslie. Both on the occasion of this call were perfect, in tact, in warmth, in friendship. And yet with them, and the sense of the World and the World's point of view which they inevitably brought, change entered the house.

The vacuous, almost happy languor of the sick was replaced in Gerald by an irritable gloominess, decently repressed, but unconcealable.

"There's no mistake; you're getting well," remarked Aurora, when the unrest of a mind troubled by many things expressed itself in indignation against innocent inanimate objects, a drop of candle wax for burning, an ivory paper-cutter for snapping in his impatient hand. "You're getting well. I guess I can go home and feel easy about you."

And sooner than Giovanna had dared to hope when most fervently she invoked the Holy Mother, lo! the intruders, mistress and maids, bag and baggage, had left in their places room and silence. So much sooner than expected that Giovanna, clasping in her hands an incredible fee, almost found it in herself to feel regret.

CHAPTER XVI

On their last day together Gerald had asked Aurora to find the key of a certain desk-drawer and to bring him the miniature strong-box locked in it. He had taken out one by one, to show her, the little store of trinkets once belonging to his mother and given her from among them the one he thought most charming, an old silver cross studded with amethysts and pearls.

Her own house, when she reentered it, looked faintly unfamiliar, as if she had been away much longer than she had by actual count. But her big soft bed looked good to her, she told Estelle, after the bed of granite framed in iron she had lately occupied.

She was in high good spirits. Gerald out of the woods, the amethyst cross, Estelle and her beautiful commodious house returned to, vistas ahead of good times and heart satisfactions, a sense of success and the richness of life--Aurora was in splendid spirits.

Estelle and she slept together on the first night, so as to be able to buzz until morning, as they had used to do in their young days, when one of them was allowed to go on a visit to the other and stay overnight.

There ensued a very orgy of talk, a going over of all that had happened since their separation, quite as if they had not once seen each other in the interval.

It might have been thought, when their remarks finally became far s.p.a.ced, as they did between two and three of the morning, that this happened because the streams were running dry as well as because the talkers were growing sleepy; but no such thing. Each had loads more that she might have told; but each, as had not been the case in the old days, was keeping back something from the other. Each locked in her breast a secret.

There had naturally been talk of Gerald. Estelle was immensely nice about him, and Aurora appeared immensely frank, but yet both knew that he was to be a delicate subject between them thenceforward, and that thoughts relating to him could not be exchanged without reserve.

There had been laughter over Estelle's subterfuges in order not to let it be learned from her, and this without directly lying, that Aurora was actually living at Gerald's. "It's a case of a cold," she had explained her friend's non-appearance upon one occasion, without mentioning whose cold.

The details of Busteretto's illness and danger had caused him to be reached for in the dark and kissed and cuddled anew.

"My, but it's nice to have you back!" Estelle said in the morning, fixing a bright, fond gaze upon her friend across the little table in the bedroom, where they sat in their wrappers eating breakfast. "A penny for your thoughts, Nell. What are you thinking about?"

Nell smiled rather foolishly, then, putting Satan behind her in the shape of a temptation to prevaricate, said:

"I was thinking what they were doing over there. Whether Gerald has had a good night, and about Giovanna, and what it's all like without me.

It's hard for me now to think of the place without me. I miss myself there."

"I suppose you'll be driving round to inquire sometime in the course of the day," Estelle said, with true generosity; at which Aurora tried to look as if she were not sure; she would think about it.

With arms around each other's waists they went through all the rooms for Aurora to renew her pleasure in them after absence. They came to a standstill before her portrait in the drawing-room.

"There's no mistake, he's talented," Estelle admitted good-humoredly, after a considerable silence. "That's a fine portrait."

Aurora did not say she thought so, too. Alone in her room later, while Estelle was dressing to go out together, she looked at the other portrait to see if she were "any nearer educated up to it." It seemed to her she was, a little bit.

She started to dress. Being given to homely rather than poetic fancies, she subsequently thought of herself as having been, during the process of making herself fine for the afternoon drive and call, like some Cape Cod young one trotting happily along with her tin pail full of blueberries, just before a big dog sprang out of the roadside tangle and jostled the pail out of her hand, so that all the berries were spilled....

Even as she was b.u.t.toning her gloves a letter came for her with a parcel. All rosy with delight, she quickly found in her purse a reward for Gaetano, the bringer. Without too much hurry, like a person not eager to shorten a solid enjoyment, she opened the letter. It did not strike her as surprising, certainly not as ominous, that Gerald should write when he might expect to see her so soon. She read:

This is the fourth letter, dearest Aurora, that I have written you since waking, after a very bad night, in such a black humor that you would know I am quite myself again and life has resumed for me its natural colors. I destroyed those letters one after the other because, although written with the effort of my whole being to be what you call sweet, they sounded to me insufferably disagreeable. And now whatever I write I shall have to send because if I destroy this letter also I shall not have time to write another before you come to see me as you promised.

And the reason for my wretched night was that I was haunted by all the reasons there are why you should not come. They are so difficult to put into words that I despair, after three attempts, of doing it in any but an offensive manner. Pity, Aurora, the plight of your poor patient; permit him not to go into them. Just--don't come.

Alas! that cannot be all. I have the vision of your puzzled face. Well, then, it is for yourself, in part. I have no excuse for profiting by a kindness that may be harmful to you. It is my duty to regard for you the conventions you are big-heartedly willing to disregard. I deplore the fact that I was ever so weak as to forget it.

But it is also for myself, who must not further be demoralized and spoiled.

I must not, moreover, be laid further under obligations of grat.i.tude, the less, my dear Aurora, that grat.i.tude is not precisely what I feel.

No. I so little dote upon life that I should be glad if a merciful angel's attention had not been drawn to me, and I perhaps might have escaped the dreary prolongation of years. I am sorry, but so it is.

Pray do not conceive any relation between what I have just written and the request that follows. Will you be so kind as to return the object belonging to me which I miss from the little table-drawer at the head of my bed? You had no right to take it.

Vincent Johns is coming in a day or two. Do not think of me, therefore, as lonely or neglected.

I find I must hurry or be too late. This letter is beastly and ought to be torn up like the others. It simply cannot; it must go. I can only pray, Aurora, that you will understand.

Aurora went back to the beginning and read the letter a second time.

Then she turned to the accompanying parcel and noticed that it was done up in a shabby piece of old newspaper. It contained a pair of fur-lined velvet shoes, a bow-knot of blue satin ribbon, and a bottle of almond milk, things of her own which through carelessness had been left behind.

She could not know that the honest Giovanna alone was responsible for this return of her property. Coming at that moment, it formed the occasion for two stinging tears rising to the edge of Aurora's eyes. She swept them away with the back of her glove, and forbade any more to follow. To prevent them she took her lips between her teeth, and with all her strength called upon her pride.

She read Gerald's letter over again, really trying to understand, to be fair, to interpret it in the high-minded way he would wish.

"When all is said, it amounts to this,"--she reached the end of that exercise by a short cut,--"he wants to be let alone."

And after every allowance had been made for him, and all due deference paid to his excellent reasons, still it seemed to her what she couldn't call anything but a poor return. Because his letter was bound to hurt her, and he must have known it. His sending it, therefore, argued a lack of any very deep affection for her. After she had come, just from his own words and actions, to supposing....

"This is what you get for not remembering that if a person is practically a foreigner you can never expect to know them except in spots," she admonished herself.