After they had driven in the Cascine and around the Viali for the sunshine and air, Aurora asked suddenly:

"Haven't we had enough of this?" and ordered the coachman to go home.

"Why!" exclaimed Estelle, astonished, "I thought we were going to Gerald Fane's to see how he's getting along!"

"No, I guess we won't. I think it's time, after living with him for three weeks, that I began to look after my reputation, don't you?" said Aurora, with a forced lightness of rather bitter effect.

"I had a note from him, anyhow, just before we came out," she added after a moment. "He's doing all right."

Estelle understood that something was wrong. Aurora could not successfully pretend with her. Aurora's transparent face, as she now took note of it, betrayed hidden perplexity and chagrin. Estelle asked no questions, not needing to be told that Gerald's note had worked the change. Despite her affection for her friend, indeed, just because of that affection, Estelle was quietly glad of it. Her thought caressed the secret which has been referred to, a scheme which for some weeks had given her an excited feeling of having between her fingers the thread of the Fates.

After Estelle had gone to her own room for the night, Aurora sat down to compose an answer to Gerald's letter. She had reflected a good deal since receiving it, and out of confusion and complexity singled one clear and simple thought or two.

Gerald had never said or intimated that she had forced herself upon him when he was too ill to help it; but the truth was she had done that, after all his shying rocks at her, too, to keep her off. Nor had Gerald suggested that one of his reasons for wishing her not to haunt his bedside was a fear of her becoming inconveniently fond of him. A hint could be found, if one chose, that he feared becoming too fond of her, but of the other no vestige, no shadow, or ghost of a shadow. Yet by those two points the spirit of Aurora's reply must be inspired.

Centuries of civilization have ground into the female of the species one particular lesson.

So the irascible man's nervous, hurried and harried scrawl, written with sputtering pen that at several places tore clean through the paper, and written under the compulsion of his soul and his good sense, received from the best of women an answer in her calmest hand, deliberately calculated to give him pain, at the same time as to convey to him unambiguously that, as far as she was concerned, he was freer than the birds of the air. She wrote:

My dear friend Gerald,

What I want princ.i.p.ally to say is just _don't worry_. Don't worry for fear I'll come, and don't worry for fear I won't understand, and don't worry because you think my feelings may be hurt. And above all the rest, don't worry about _grat.i.tude_, for I don't feel you owe me any at all. Don't you think for a moment that I saved your life. You were not as sick as you imagine, I guess. It was a very light case, or how would you have got over it so soon? You were not near as sick, according to all accounts, as poor Busteretto, who has been having what they call here the _cimurro_. I took you in hand because _I am a nurse_ and I couldn't keep my hands off, just as an old fire-engine horse will start to gallop when he hears a fire-alarm even if he isn't on the job. If it had been Italo Ceccherelli who was sick I would have been tempted in just the same way; so you see there is no occasion for grat.i.tude. Put it out of your mind.

Now about the thing I took from the drawer of your night-stand.

I am very sorry I can't give it back, because I flung it out in the middle of the river. That is what I did with it, and I am not sorry either. You know that we at home don't look upon certain things as you apparently do over here. We think it a disgrace for a man to kill himself. I myself am old-fashioned enough to think that that door leads to h.e.l.l. I have been astonished to find that over here it is thought quite respectable, that some Italians look upon it as an honorable way, for instance, of paying their debts, and a natural way of getting over an unhappy love-affair. As I know you have a good many foreign ideas, and as you have once or twice made a remark that showed me you thought of that solution of difficulties as a possible one, I grabbed your nasty old pistol when I found it in the little drawer, and it reposes now at the bottom of the Arno.

Don't get another, Gerald. No burglars are going to enter your house to steal your Roman tear-bottle or your books. When you are so blue you feel like killing yourself, say your prayers. I am very glad your friend the abbe is going to come and stay with you. He is a _good influence_, I feel sure, and a good friend.

I suppose I shall see you again some time, even if I don't do the visiting. But don't be in any hurry, not on my account. I hope that in the meantime you will get back your strength quickly. Remember that you will have to be very careful for quite a long time, because a relapse is _an awfully mean thing_.

Good-by, my dear Gerald. Please accept the very best wishes of

Yours sincerely, Aurora Hawthorne.

P.S. I did not write four letters and tear three of them up, like you. I wrote one and corrected it, and here I have copied it out for you, hoping that in it I have made my meaning as clear to you as you made yours clear to me in your letter.

CHAPTER XVII

When the latter occurrences had shaken down in Aurora's mind, Gerald's letter, which she from time to time re-read, impressed her as a most gentle and reasonable production of his pen, while her own letter, preserved in the original scribble, appeared to her horrid, cutting, and uncalled for.

But there was now nothing to do about it. The state of mind created in her by the whole episode prepared her to welcome with open arms any diversion, any event which would restore to her self-conceit a little vitality or lay on her heart a little balm; and so when, at the psychological moment, Doctor Thomas Bewick surprisingly turned up in Florence,--it may be remembered that he was Estelle's choice for Nell,--Nell fell on his neck quite literally, and gave him a full, sonorous kiss.

"Tom! Tom!" she cried in delight, "how good it is to see you!"

This happened in her formal drawing-room, whither she had gone on the servant's announcement that a gentleman from America, who had given no card or name, asked to see her.

Their greeting over, she ran out into the hall, screaming joyfully:

"Hat! Hat! Come down this minute! Hurry up! You'll never guess who's here!"

In reply to which summons Estelle came hurrying down the stairs with an innocent, expectant air.

"If it isn't Doctor Bewick!" she exclaimed, without giving herself away by one false inflection. "Why, Doctor Bewick, this is simply too awfully nice! What _are_ you doing over here? Who _would_ have expected to see _you_?"

"Tom," said Aurora, "I was never in my life so glad to see any one. I didn't know how much I'd missed you till I saw you. You good old thing!

You nice old boy! Aren't you a brick to have come! My soul, my soul! I didn't know till this minute how tired I am of foreigners and half-foreigners and quarter-foreigners and all their ways. I was hungry for home-folks and didn't know it. Now, please G.o.d, we'll have some talk where we know that when we use the same words we mean the same thing, and aren't wondering all the time what's really in the other's mind!"

The man to whom this was said absorbed it with a face fixed in smiles of pleasure. He was a big blond man, disposed to corpulence, and looking somewhat like a fresh-faced, gigantic boy until his eye met yours and gave the note of a fine, mature intelligence, open on every side, and un.o.btrusively gathering in what it had no strong impulse afterward to give out again in any open form of self-expression.

Tolerant, not from any vagueness of judgment; easy to get on with, but not to drive or to deceive, he looked strikingly the good fellow, yet kept you in respect. An air of capability, a consciousness of definite achievements, went coupled in him with the humor that would prevent b.u.mptiousness however great the matter for pride. A quiet carelessness of other people's opinions formed part of his effect of poise; the opinions of dukes would have affected him as little as those of rag-pickers, unless they recommended themselves to that judicial spot in his brain at which he tried them. He was level-headed, unsentimental, but kind, of a kindness that like good-humor seemed almost physical, and made him stop to stroke the kitchen cat as well as see to it that the negress's baby had the right milk for its orphaned stomach.

He looked at Aurora with smiling scrutiny, and facially expressed a vast appreciation. She looked back at him with eyes of laughing tenderness.

Avoiding to speak directly to her the compliments rising in his mind, he turned to Estelle.

"Hasn't she blossomed out!"

"Isn't she wonderful?" chimed in that friend, enthusiastically.

Aurora, with a comedy of pride, threw up her chin, lifted her arms, and turned as if on a pivot, to show herself off in her elegance. She had on the wine-colored street-dress bordered with black fox; over its white satin waistcoat embroidered with gold hung in a splendid loop her pink corals. The restraining Paris corset gave to her luxuriant form a charming modish correctness of line.

"Oh, Tom,"--she sank happily on the sofa beside him,--"we're having the time of our lives! Just wait till you see me in company, and hear me put on my good English, when, instead of calling things lovely or horrid, I call them amusing or beastly or impossible. But your turn first. Give us the Denver news."

After dinner that evening, in the midst of Italo's brilliant performance, a caller came,--a thin, oldish, English-speaking lady whose black dress made no pretense of following the fashion.

Aurora had met her at Mrs. Satterlee's during a meeting appointed to raise funds for the Protestant orphanage. When this philanthropist, after a little talk of other things, mentioned the relict of a mason, left with five young children, Estelle and Dr. Bewick took it as a hint to withdraw beyond earshot. The two ladies were left talking in undertones; after a minute they found themselves alone in the room.

Estelle preceded Dr. Bewick across the hall to the dining-room, deserted and orderly, where the drop-light rained its direct brightness only on the rich and variegated tapestry cover of the table beneath it. From the sideboard--whence the marble fruit had for some time been missing--she brought a bottle of aerated water and a gla.s.s to set before him; she found him an ash-tray, and seated herself beside the table near him in such a way as to get, through the parted half-doors, a glimpse of the visitor when she should leave.

Before speaking, she exchanged with the doctor a look of intelligence.

"You see what I mean?" she asked little above a whisper.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Aurora, with a comedy of pride, threw up her chin, lifted her arms, and turned as if on a pivot, to show herself off in her elegance]

Dr. Bewick looked all around the room with leisurely appraising eyes, then nodded understanding. There was no intimation that he was not ready to listen, but he did not seem quite ready to talk. His white shirt-bosom was remarkably broad as he leaned back in his chair in the slightly lolling fashion of large, good-humored men. For all the nonchalance of his att.i.tude, he looked, from evening tie to thin-soled dress-boots, beautifully spruce, as Aurora had remarked, and made an appropriate pendant to her in her Parisian finery.

Approval of him was written large on Estelle's pleasant, alert countenance; a quiet, comprehensive liking for her sat as plainly in the eyes reflecting her slim person and evening-frock of beaded net. Being Nell's friends made them friends, a thing not so common as one wishes.

Through her they felt almost on the familiar terms of old friendship, although Estelle had never met Dr. Tom Bewick before he came to New York to see them off on their great four-stacked ocean-steamer.

"You see what I mean?" she asked, and, not expecting a regular answer, did not wait for it. "Now that woman won't leave until she has secured support for the mason's five children, and she'll do this without the smallest difficulty. In a day or two some one else will come, with the sad case of a poor father out of work who is going to have to sell his blind daughter's canary unless Nell steps in to relieve their wants. And Nell will step in. Word has been pa.s.sed, just as they say a tramp at home marks a house where he's been given a meal, and every case of want in this town, it seems to me, is hopefully brought to Nell. And she listens every time; she doesn't get sick of it. And you know, Doctor, that her circ.u.mstances don't warrant it."

Bewick, as Estelle stopped for some comment on his side, made a slight motion of chin and eyelids that partly or deprecatingly agreed with her.

He took the cigar out of his mouth, but having knocked the ash off, replaced it, to listen further and not for the moment speak.

"It's positively funny, the things Nell has been doing with her money,"