PONTYCROFT was really, as men go, a tallish man,—above, at any rate, what they call the medium height,—say five feet ten or eleven. But seated, like a Turk or a tailor—as he was seated now on the lawn of Villa Santa Cecilia, and as it was very much his ridiculous custom to sit,—with his head sunk forward and his legs curled up beneath him, making a mere torso of himself, he left you rather with an impression of him as short. That same sunken head, by the by, was a somewhat noticeable head; noticeably big; covered by a thick growth, close-cropped, of fawn-coloured hair; broad, with heavy bumps over the thick fawn-coloured eyebrows; the forehead traversed by many wrinkles, vertical and horizontal, deep almost as if they had been scored with a knife. It was a white forehead, but the face below, abruptly from the hat-line, was as brown as sun and open air could burn it, red-brown and lean, showing its sub-structure of bone: not by any means a handsome face; nay, with its short nose, perilously near a snub, its forward-thrust chin, deeply-cleft in the middle, its big mouth and the short fawn-coloured moustache that bristled on the lip, decidedly a plain face; yet decidedly too, somehow, a distinguished, very decidedly a pleasing face—shrewd, humorous, friendly; capable, trustworthy—lighted by grey eyes that seemed always to be smiling.

They were certainly smiling at this moment, as he looked off towards Florence, (where it lay under a thin drift of pearl-dust in the sun-filled valley), and spoke in his smiling masculine voice.

“Up at the villa—down in the city,” he said. “I never could sympathise with that Italian person of quality. Surely, it's a thousand times jollier to be up at the villa. Then one can look down upon the city, and admire it as a feature of the landscape, and thank goodness one isn't there.”

Ruth's eyes (with the red glint in them) laughed at him. She sat leaning back on a rustic bench, a few yards away, under a mighty ilex. She wore a frock of pale green muslin, and her garden-hat had fallen on the ground beside her, so that what breeze there was could make free with her hair.

“You are not an Italian person of quality, you see,” she said. “You are a beef-eating Britisher, and retain a barbaric fondness for the greenwood tree. You are like Peter Bell, who never felt the witchery of the soft blue sky. You have never felt the witchery of brick and mortar.”

Pontycroft, puffing his cigarette, regarded her through the smoke with a feint of thoughtful curiosity.

“The worst thing about the young people of your generation,” he remarked, assuming the tone of one criticising from an altitude, “is that you have no conversation. Talk, among you, consists exclusively of personalities—gossip or chaff. Now, I was on the point of drawing a really rather neat little philosophical analogy; and you, instead of playing flint to steel, instead of encouraging me with a show of intelligent interest, check my inspiration with idle, personal chaff. Still, hatless young girls in greenery-whitery frocks, if they have plenty of reddish hair, add a very effective note to the foreground of a garden; and I suppose one should be content with them as they are.”

Ruth ostentatiously “composed a face,” bending her head at the angle of intentness, lifting her eyebrows, making her eyes big and rapt.

“There,” she said, taking a deep breath, “I hope that is a show of intelligent interest. Let me hear your really rather neat little philosophical analogy.”

“No,” said Pontycroft, with a melancholy shake of the head, “that is only a show of the irreverence of youth for age. What is the fun of my being a hundred years your elder, if you are not to treat me with proportionate respect? And as for my analogy (which, perhaps, on second thoughts, is not so neat as I fancied), if I give it utterance, I shall do so simply for the sake of clarifying it to myself. It has reference to the everlasting problem of evil. Human life is like a city; and a city seen from a distance”—he waved his cigarette towards Florence—“is like human life taken as a whole. Taken piecemeal, bit by bit, as it passes, life dismays us, and terribly tries our faith, by the Evil it presents: the pain, disease, foul play, inequalities, injustices, what you will: just as a city, when we are in its streets, revolts us with its dirt, decay, squalor, stagnant air, noise, confusion, and its sordid population. But just as the city seen from a distance, just as Florence seen from here, loses all its piecemeal ugliness, and melts into a beautiful and harmonious unity, so human life viewed as a whole.... Well, you have my analogy—which, perhaps, after all, is really rather banal. Ah me, I wish I could marry you off. Why do you so systematically refuse all the brilliant offers that I so tirelessly contrive for you?”

But Ruth seemed not to have heard his question, though he underlined it by looking up at her with a frown of grave anxiety.

“Unfortunately for us human beings,” she said, “no one has yet invented a process by which we can live our life as a whole. It's all very well to talk of viewing it, but we have to live it; and we have to live it piecemeal, bit by bit.”

“Well,” demanded Pontycroft, cheerfully inconsequent, “what can we ask better? Given health, wealth, and a little wisdom, it's extremely pleasant to live our life piecemeal. It's extremely pleasant to take it bit by bit, when the bits are sweet. And what, for instance, could be a sweeter bit than this?” His lean brown hand described a comprehensive circle. “A bright, crisp, cool, warm September morning; a big beautiful garden, full of fragrant airs; Italian sunshine, and the shade of ilexes; oleanders in blossom; cool turf to lie on, and a fountain tinkling cool music near at hand; then, beyond there, certainly the loveliest prospect in the world to feed our eyes—Val d'Arno, with its olive-covered hills, its cypresses, its white-walled villas, and Florence shining like a cut gem in the midst. Add good tobacco to smoke, and a simple child in white-green muslin, with plenty of reddish hair, to try one's analogies upon. What could man wish better? Why don't you get married? Why do you so perversely reject all the eligible suitors that I trot out for your inspection?”

Ruth's eyes laughed at him again. It was a laugh of frank amusement, but I think there was something dangerous in it too, a quick flash of mockery, even of menace and defiance.

“Among the train there is a swain I dearly lo' mysel',” she lightly sang, her head thrown back. “But you've never trotted him out. I don't get married'—detestable expression—because the only man I've ever seriously cared for has never asked me.” She sighed—regretfully, resignedly; and made him a comical little face.

Pontycroft studied her for a moment. Then, “Ho!” he scoffed. “A good job, too. I wasn't aware that you'd ever seriously cared for any one; but if you have—believe me, he's the last man living you should think of tying up with. The people we care for in our calf-period are always the wrong people.”

Ruth raised her eyebrows. “Calf-period? How pretty—but how sadly misapplied. I'm twenty-four years old. Besides, the person I care for is the right person, the rightest of all right persons, absolutely the one rightest person in the world.”

“Who is he?” Pontycroft asked carelessly, lighting a fresh cigarette.

Still again Ruth's eyes laughed at him. “What's his name and where's his hame I dinna care to tell,” again she sang.

“Pooh!” said Pontycroft, blowing the subject from him in a whiff of smoke. “He's a baseless fabrication. He's a herring you've just invented to draw across the trail of my inquiries. But even if he were authentic, he wouldn't matter, since he's well-advised enough not to sue for your hand. Have you ever heard of a man called Bertrando Bertrandoni?”

“Bertrando Bertrandoni—Phoebus! what a name!” laughed Ruth.

“Yes,” assented Pontycroft, “it's a trifle cumbrous, also perhaps a trifle flamboyant. So his English friends (he was educated in England, and you'd never know he wasn't English) have docked it to simple Bertram. Have you ever heard of him?”

“I don't think so,” said Ruth, shaking her head.

“And yet he's a pretty well-known man,” said Pontycroft. “He writes—every now and then you'll see an article of his in one of the reviews. He paints, too—you'll see his pictures at the Salon; and plays the fiddle, and sings. A jack-of-many-trades, but, by exception, really rather a dab at 'em all. A sportsman besides—goes in for yachtin', huntin', fencin'. But over and above all that, a thorough good sort and a most amusing companion—a fellow who can talk, a fellow who's curious about things. Finally, a Serene and Semi-Royal Highness.”

“Oh?” questioned Ruth, wondering.

“Ah,” said Pontycroft, “you prick up your pretty ears. Yes, a Serene and Semi-Royal Highness. Has it ever struck you how chuckle-headed—saving their respect—our ancestors were? I suppose they drank the wrong sort of tea. Anyhow, they were mistaken about nearly everything, and most of their mistakes they elevated to the dignity of maxims. Now, for example, they had a maxim about Silence being golden, and another about Curiosity being a vice. It's pitiful to think of the enormous number of more or less tedious anecdotes they laboriously imagined to illustrate and enforce those two profound untruths. Silence golden? My dear, silence is simply piggish. Your silent man is simply a monstrous Egotist, who, in what should be the reciprocal game of conversation, takes without giving—allows himself to be entertained, perhaps enriched, at his interlocuter's expense, and is too soddenly self-complacent to feel that he owes anything in return. Oh, I know, you'll plead shyness for him—you'll tell me he doesn't speak because he's shy. In a certain number of cases, I grant, that is the fact. But what then? Why, shyness is Egotism multiplied by itself. Your shy person is a person so sublimely (or infernally) conscious of his own existence and his own importance, so penetrated by the conviction that he is the centre of the Universe and that all eyes are fixed upon him, and therewith so concerned about the effect he may produce, the figure he may cut, that he dare not move lest he shouldn't produce an heroic effect or cut an Olympian figure. And then, curiosity! A vice? Look here. You are born, with eyes, ears, and a brain, into a world that God created. You have eyes, ears, and a brain, and all round you is a world that God created—and yet you are not curious about it. A world that God created, and that man, your duplicate man, lives in; a world in which everything counts, small things as well as big things—the farthest planet and the trifling-est affair of your next-door neighbour, the course of Empire and the price of figs. But no—God's world, man's life—they leave you cold, they fail to interest you; you glance indifferently at them, they hardly seem worth your serious attention, you shrug and turn away. 'Tis a world that God created, and you treat it as if it were a child's mud-pie! Good heavens! And the worst of it is that the people who do that are mightily proud of themselves in their smug fashion. Curiosity is a vice and a weakness; they are above it. My sweet child, no single good thing has ever happened to mankind, no single forward step has ever been taken in what they call human progress, but it has been primarily due to some one's 'curiosity.'” He brought the word out with a flourish, making it big. Then he lay back, and puffed hard at his cigarette.

“Go on,” urged Ruth demurely. “Please don't stop. I like half-truths, and as for quarter-truths, I perfectly adore them.”

“Bertram,” said Pontycroft, “is a fellow who can talk, and a fellow who's curious about things.”

“I see,” said Ruth. “And yet,” she reflected, as one trying to fit together incompatible ideas, “I think you let fall something about his being a Serene and Semi-Royal Highness.”

“My dear,” Pontycroft instructed her, “there are intelligent individuals in all walks of life. There are intelligent princes, there are even intelligent scientific persons. The Bertrandoni are the legitimate grand-dukes of Altronde, the old original dynasty. They were 'hurled from the throne,' I don't know how many years ago, in a revolution, and the actual reigning family, the Ceresini, have been in possession ever since. But Bertram's father is the Pretender. He calls himself the Duke of Oltramare, and lives in Paris—lives there, I grieve to state, in the full Parisian sense—is a professed viveur. I met him once, a handsome old boy, military-looking, red-faced, with a white moustache and imperial, and a genially wicked eye. Anyhow, there's one thing to his credit—he had Bertram educated at Harrow and Cambridge, instead of at one of these soul-destroying Continental universities. He and his Duchess never meet. She and Bertram are supposed to live in Venice, at the palace of the family, CÀ Bertrandoni, though as a matter of fact you'll rarely find either of them at home. She spends most of her time in Austria, where she was born—a Wohenhoffen, if you please; there's no better blood. And Bertram is generally at the other end of the earth—familiarizing himself with the domestic manners of the Annamites, or the religious practices of the Patagonians. However, I believe lately he's dropped that sort of thing—given up travelling and settled down.”

“This is palpitatingly interesting,” said Ruth. “Is it all apropos of boots?”

Pontycroft put on his hat, and stood up.

“It's apropos,” he answered, “of your immortal welfare. I had a note from Bertram this morning to say he was in Florence, no farther away than that. I'm going down now to call on him, and I'll probably bring him back to luncheon. So tell Lucilla to have a plate laid for him. Also put on your best bib and tucker, and try to behave as nicely as you can. For if you should impress him favourably.... Ah me, I wish I could marry you off.”

“Ah me, I wish you could—to the man I care for,” responded Ruth, with dreamy eyes, and wistfulness real or feigned.

II

“But I have already met them, your sister and Miss Adgate,” Bertram announced, with an occult little laugh. Pontycroft looked his surprise.

“Really? They've kept precious mum about it. When? Where?”

“The other day at Venice,” Bertram laughed. “I even had the honour of escorting them to their hotel in my gondola.”

Pontycroft's face bespoke sudden enlightenment.

“Oho!” he cried. “Then you're the mysterious stranger who came to their rescue when they were benighted at the Lido. They've told me about that. And oh, the quantities of brain-tissue they've expended wondering who you were!”

Bertram chuckled.

“But how,” asked Pontycroft, the wrinkles of his brow tied into puzzled knots, “how did you know who they were?”

“I saw them the next day when I was at the Florian with Lewis Vincent, and he told me,” Bertram explained.

Pontycroft laughed, deeply, silently. “Thank Providence I shall be present at the scene that's coming. The man of the family brings a friend home to luncheon, and lo, the ladies recognise in him their gallant rescuer. It's amazing how Real Life rushes in where Fiction fears to tread. That scene is one which has been banished from literature these thirty years, which no playwright or novelist would dare to touch; yet here is Real Life blithely serving it up to us as if it were quite fresh. It's another instance—and every one has seen a hundred—of Real Life sedulously apeing ill-constructed and unconvincing melodrama.”

Bertram, leaning on the window-sill, and looking down at the yellow flood of the Arno, again softly chuckled.

“Yes,” he said; “but in this case I'm afraid Real Life has received a little adventitious encouragement.” He turned back into the room, the stiff hotel sitting-room, with its gilt-and-ebony furniture, its maroon-and-orange hangings. “The truth is that I've come to Florence for the especial purpose of seeing you—and of seeking this introduction.”

“Oh?” murmured Ponty, bowing. “So much the better, then,” he approved. “Though I beg to observe,” he added, “that this doesn't elucidate the darker mystery—how you knew that we were here.”

“Ah,” laughed Bertram, “the unsleeping vigilance of the Press. Your movements are watched and chronicled. There was a paragraph in the Anglo-Italian Times. It fell under my eye the day before yesterday, and—well, you see whether I have let the grass grow. My glimpse of the ladies was extremely brief, but it was enough to make me very keen to meet them again. After all, I have a kind of prescriptive right to know Lady Dor—isn't she the sister of one of my oldest friends? Miss Adgate,” he spoke with respectful hesitancy, “I think I have heard, is an American?”

“Of sorts—yes,” Ponty answered. “But without the feathers. Her father was a New Englander, who came to Europe on the death of his wife, when Ruth was three years old, and never went back. So she's entirely a European product.”

His smiling eyes studied for a moment the flowers and clouds and cupids painted in blue and pink upon the ceiling. Then his theme swept him on.

“He was a very remarkable man, her father. I think he had the widest, the most all-round culture of any man I've ever known; he was beyond question the most brilliant talker. And he was wonderful to look at, with a great old head and a splendid tangle of hair and beard. He was a man who could have distinguished himself ten times over, if he would only have done things—written books, or what not.

“But he positively didn't know what ambition meant; he hadn't a trace of vanity, of the desire to shine, in his whole composition. Therefore he did nothing—except absorb knowledge, and delight his friends with his magnificent talk. He made me the executor of his will, and when he died it turned out that he was vastly richer than any one had thought.. Twenty odd years before, he had taken some wild land in Wyoming for a bad debt, and meanwhile the city of Agamenon had been obliging enough to spring up upon it. So, when Ruth attained her majority, I was able to hand over to her a fortune of about thirty thousand a year.”

“Really?” said Bertram, and thought of Mrs. Wilberton. This rhymed somewhat faultily with the story of a money-lender. Then, while Pontycroft, his legs curled up, sat on the maroon-and-orange sofa, and puffed his eternal cigarette, Bertram took a turn or two about the room. He didn't want to ask questions; he didn't want to seem to pry. But he did want to hear just as much about Ruth Adgate as Pontycroft might be inclined to tell. He didn't want to ask questions, and yet, after a minute, as Pontycroft simply smoked in silence, he ended by asking one.

“I think Miss Adgate is of the Old Religion?”

“Yes—her father was a convert, and a mighty fervent and eloquent one, too,” Ponty replied nowise loth to pursue the subject. “That was what first brought us together. We were staying at the same inn in one of the Protestant cantons of Switzerland, and on Sunday morning all three of us tramped off nine miles to hear Mass, Ruth being then about ten. He was a man who never went in for general society. He never went in for anything usual or conventional. His life was extraordinarily detached. But he had his own little group of friends, of old cronies and young disciples, in pretty nearly every town of Europe, so that he never needed to be lonely. And he had a brother, an elder brother, whom he was always going out to America to see; General Adgate, United States Army, retired, residing at Oldbridge, Connecticut. Every spring, every summer, every autumn, old Tom Adgate made his plans to go and visit the General, and then he put the visit off. I think he'd never really got over his grief for the death of his wife, and that he dreaded returning to the places that were associated with her.”

Bertram did not want to ask questions—yet now he asked another.

“But Miss Adgate herself—has she never been to America?”

“No, she won't go,” Pontycroft said. “We've urged her, pressed her to go, Lucilla and I—not to stop, of course—but to see the place, to faire acte de presence. Lucilla has even offered to go with her. And the General has written fifty times begging her to come and stay with him at Oldbridge. She really ought to go. It's her native country, and she ought to make its acquaintance. But she seems to have imbibed a prejudice against it. She's been unfortunate in getting hold of some rather terrible American newspapers, printed in all the colours of the rainbow, in which the London correspondents made her and her affairs the subject of their prose. And then she's read some American novels. I'm bound to confess that I can understand her shrinking a bit, if American society is anything like what American novelists depict. The people seem entirely to lack manners,—and the novelists seem ingenuously oblivious of the deficiency. They present the most unmitigated bounders, and appear in all good faith to suppose they are presenting gentlemen and ladies.”

“Yes,” agreed Bertram, smiling, “one has noticed that.” Then, thoughtful-eyed, pacing the floor, the world-traveller spoke: “But America is very big, and very heterogeneous in its elements, and the novelists leave a good deal out. There's no such thing as American society,—there are innumerable different societies, unassimilated, unaffiliated, and one must pick and choose. Besides, Oldbridge—didn't you say—is in New England? New England is an extraordinary little world apart, as unlike the rest of the country as—as a rural dean is unlike a howling dervish. The rest of the country is in the making, a confusion of materials that don't match; New England is finished, completed; and of a piece. Take Boston, for instance,—I really don't know a more interesting town. It's pretty, it's even stately; it's full of colour and character; it's full of expression,—it expresses its race and its history. And as for society, Boston society is as thoroughbred as any I have ever encountered—easy, hospitable, with standards, with traditions, and at the same time with a faint breath of austerity, a little remainder of Puritanism, that is altogether surprising and amusing, and in its effect rather tonic. No, no, there's nothing to shrink from in New England—unless, perhaps, its winter climate. It can't be denied that they sometimes treat you to sixty degrees of frost.”

Pontycroft blew a long stream of smoke, “I'll ask you to repeat that sermon to Ruth herself.”

Bertram halted, guiltily hung his head. “I beg your pardon—my text ran away with me. But why doesn't—if Miss Adgate won't go to America, why doesn't America come to her? Why doesn't General Adgate come to Europe?” Pontycroft's brows knotted themselves again. “Ah, why indeed?” he echoed. “Hardly for want of being asked, at any rate. Ruth has asked him, my sister has asked him, I have asked him. And it seems a smallish enough thing to do. But in his way, I imagine he's as unlike other folk as his brother was in his. He's a bachelor—wedded, apparently, to his chimney-corner. There's no dislodging him—at least by the written word. So Ruth, you see, is rather peculiarly alone in the world, as I'm afraid she sometimes rather painfully feels. She has Lucilla and me, a kind of honorary sister and brother, and in England she has her old governess, Miss Nettleworth, a cousin of Charlie Nettleworth, who lives with her, and might be regarded as a stipendiary aunt. And that's all, unless you count heaps of acquaintances, and scores of wise youths who'd like to marry her. But she appears to have devoted herself to spinsterhood. One and all, she refuses 'em as fast as they come up. She's even refused a duke, which is accounted, I suppose, the most heroic thing a girl in England can do.”

“Oh——?” said Bertram, in a tone that by no means disguised his eagerness to hear more.

“Yes—Newhampton,” said Ponty. “As he tells the story himself, there's no reason why I shouldn't repeat it. His people—mother and sister—had been at him for months to propose to her, and at last (they were staying in the same country house) he took her for a walk in the shrubberies and did his filial and fraternal duty. I'm not sure whether you know him? The story isn't so funny unless you do. He's a tiny little chap, only about six-and-twenty, beardless, rosy-gilled—looks for all the world like a boy fresh from Eton. 'By Jove, I thought my hour had struck,' says he. 'I'd no idea I should come out of it a free man. Well, it shows that honesty is the best policy, after all. I told her honestly that my heart was a burnt-out volcano—that I hoped I should make a kind and affectionate husband—but that I had had my grande passion, and could never love again; if she chose to accept me on that understanding—well, I was at her disposal. After which I stood and quaked, waiting for my doom. But she—she simply laughed. And then she said I was the honestest fellow she'd ever known, and had made the most original proposal she'd ever listened to, which she wouldn't have missed for anything; and to reward me for the pleasure I'd given her, she would let me off—decline my offer with thanks. Yes, by Jove, she regularly rejected me—me, a duke—with the result that we've been the best of friends ever since.' And so indeed they have,” concluded Ponty with a laugh.

Bertram laughed too—and thought of Stuart Seton.

“The Duchess-mother, though,” Ponty went on, “was inconsolable—till I was fortunate enough to console her. I discovered that she had an immensely exaggerated notion of Ruth's wealth, and mentioned the right figures. 'Dear me,' she cried, 'in that case Ferdie has had a lucky escape. He surely shouldn't let himself go under double that.' But now”—Ponty laughed again—“observe how invincible is truth. There are plenty of people in England who'll tell you that they were actually engaged, and that when it came to settlements, finding she wasn't so rich as he'd supposed, Newhampton cried off.”

Bertram had resumed his walk about the room. Presently, “You know Stuart Seton, of course?” he asked, coming to a standstill.

“Of course,” said Ponty. “Why?”

“What do you think of him?” asked Bertram.

“'A fine puss-gentleman that's all perfume,'” Ponty laughed. “Oh, he's a harmless enough little beast, but it's a pity he oils his hair.”

“Hum,” said Bertram, with an air of profound thought.

Ponty looked at his watch.

“I say,” he cried, starting up; “it's time we were off.”

III

There was, however, no such scene at Villa Santa Cecilia as the man of the family (I'm afraid with some malicious glee) had anticipated. The ladies indeed recognised in his friend their gallant rescuer, and no doubt experienced the appropriate emotions, but they made no violent demonstration of them. They laughed, and shook hands, and bade him welcome; Bertram laughed a good deal, too—you know how easily he laughs; and that was all. Then they went in to luncheon, during which meal, while the ball of conversation flew hither, thither, he could observe (and admire) Ruth Adgate to his heart's content: her slender figure, her oddly pretty face, her crinkling dark hair with its wine-coloured lights, her brown eyes with their red underglow, their covert laughter. “High energies quiescent”—his own first phrase came back to him. “There's something tense in her—there's a spring—there's a tense chord. If it were touched—well, one feels how it could vibrate.” A man, in other words, felt that here was a woman with womanhood in her. 'Tis a quality somewhat infrequently met with in women nowadays, and, for men, it has a singular interest and attraction.

Pontycroft, I am sorry to record it, behaved very badly at table. He began by stealing Ruth's bread; then he played balancing tricks—sufficiently ineffectual—with his knife and fork, announcing himself as ÉlÈve de Cinquevalli; then, changing his title to ÉlÈve du regrettÉ Sludge, he produced a series of what he called spirit-rappings, though they sounded rather like the rappings of sole-leather against a chair-round; then he insisted on smoking cigarettes between the courses—“after the high Spanish fashion,” he explained; and finally, assuming the wheedling tone of a spoiled child, he pleaded to be allowed to have his fruit before the proper time. “I want my fruit—mayn't I have my fruit? Ah, please let me.”

“Patience, patience,” said Lucilla, in her most soothing voice, with her benignant smile. “Everything comes at last to him who knows how to wait.”

“Everything comes at once to him who will not wait,” Ponty brazenly retorted, and leaning forward, helped himself from the crystal dish, piled high with purple figs and scarlet africani.

They returned to the garden for coffee, and afterwards Ponty engaged his sister in a game of lawn-golf, leaving Ruth and Bertram to look on from the terrace, where Ruth sat among bright-hued cushions in a wicker chair, and Bertram (conscious of a pleasant agitation) leaned on the lichen-stained marble balustrade.

“Poor Lucilla,” she said to him, the laughter in her eyes coming to the surface, “she hates it, you know. But I suppose Harry honestly thinks it amuses her, and she's too good-natured to undeceive him.”

“There are red notes in her very voice,” said Bertram to himself. “Poor lady,” he said aloud. “'Tis her penalty for having an English brother. A game of one sort or another is an Englishman's sole conception of happiness. And that is the real explanation of Anglo-Saxon superiority. Englishmen take the most serious businesses of life as games—war, politics, commerce, literature, everything. It's that which keeps them sane and makes them successful.”

Ruth looked doubtful. “Anglo-Saxon superiority?” she questioned. “Do you believe in Anglo-Saxon superiority? To be sure, we're always thanking Heaven that we're so much better than our neighbours; but apart from fond delusions, are we better?”

“You're at any rate fresher and lighter-hearted,” Bertram asseverated. “Englishmen always remain boys. We poor Continentals, especially we poor Latins, grow old and sad, or else sour, or else dry and hard. We take life either as a grand melodrama, or as a monotonous piece of prose; and it's all because we haven't your English way of taking it as a game—the saving spirit of sport.”

Ruth laughed a little. “Yes, and a good many Englishwomen remain boys, too,” she added musingly. “How is that beautiful dog of yours?” she asked. “Have you brought him with you to Florence?”

“Balzatore? No, I left him in Venice. He's rather a stickler for his creature-comforts, and the accommodations for dogs in Italian trains are not such as he approves of.”

Ruth opened wide her eyes. “Can they be worse than the accommodations for human beings?” she wondered.

“All I can tell you,” Bertram replied, “is that I once took Balzatore with me to Padua, and he howled conscientiously the whole way. I have never known a human being (barring babies) to do that. They shut him in a kind of drawer, a kind of black hole, under the carriage.”

“Brutes,” said Ruth, with a shudder. “Don't you rather admire our view?” she asked, first glancing up at her companion, and then directing her gaze down the valley.

“There never were such eyes,” said Bertram to himself. “There never was such a view,” he said to her. “With the sky and the clouds and the sun—and the haze, like gold turned to vapour—and the purple domes and pinnacles of Florence. How is it possible for a town to be at the same time so lovely and so dull?”

Ruth glanced up at him again. “Is Florence dull?”

“Don't you think so?” he asked, smiling down.

“I'm afraid I don't know it very well,” she answered. “The Ponte Vecchio seems fairly animated—and then there are always the Botticellis.”

“I dare say there are always the Botticellis,” Bertram admitted, laughing. “But the Ponte Vecchio doesn't count—the people there are all Jews. I was thinking of the Florentines.”

“Ah, yes; I see,” said Ruth. “They're chiefly retired Anglo-Indians, aren't they?”

“Well, isn't that,” demanded Bertram, with livelier laughter, “an entire concession of my point?”

“What are you people so silent about?” asked Pontycroft, coming up with Lucilla from the lawn. Lucilla sank with an ouf of thankfulness into one of the cushioned chairs. Ponty seated himself on the balustrade, near Bertram, and swung his legs.

“Never play lawn-golf with Lucilla,” he warned his listeners. “She cheats like everything. She even poked a ball into a hole with her toe.”

“A very good way of making it go in,” Lucilla answered. “Besides, if I cheated, it was for two good purposes: first, to hurry up the game, which would otherwise have lasted till I dropped; and then to show you how much more inventive and resourceful women are than men.”

She fanned her soft face gently with her pocket-handkerchief.

Ponty turned to Bertram. “Tell us the latest secret tidings from Altronde. What are the prospects of the rightful party?”

“Oh yes, do tell us of Altronde,” said Lucilla, dropping her handkerchief into her lap, and looking up with eagerness in her soft eyes. “I've never met a Pretender before. Do tell us all about it.”

Bertram laughed. “Alas,” he said, “there's nothing about it. There are no tidings from Altronde, and the rightful party (if there is one) has no prospects. And I am not a Pretender—I am merely the son of a Pretender, and my father maintains his pretensions merely as a matter of form—not to let them, in a legal sense, lapse. He is as well aware as any one that there'll never be a restoration.”

“Oh?” said Lucilla, her eyes darkening with disappointment; then, hope dying hard: “But one constantly sees paragraphs in the papers headed 'Unrest in Altronde,' and they seem to enjoy a change of ministry with each new moon.”

“Yes,” admitted Bertram, “there's plenty of unrest—the people being exorbitant drinkers of coffee; and as every deputy aspires to be a minister in turn, they change their ministry as often as they have a leisure moment. 'Tis a state very much divided against itself. But there's one thing they're in a vast majority agreed upon, and that is that they don't want a return of the Bertrandoni.”

“Were you such dreadful tyrants?” questioned Ruth, artlessly serious.

Pontycroft laughed aloud.

“There spoke the free-born daughter of America,” he cried.

“I'm afraid we were, rather,” Bertram seriously answered her. “If History speaks the truth, I'm afraid we rather led the country a dance.”

“In that respect you couldn't have held a candle to your successors,” put in Ponty.

“The Ceresini really are a handful. Let alone their extravagances, and their squabbles with their wives—I've seen Massimiliano staggering-drunk in the streets of his own capital. And then, if you drag in History, History never does speak truth.”

“I marvel the people stand it,” said Lucilla.

“They won't stand it for ever,” said Bertram. “Some day there'll be a revolution.”

“Well——? But then——? Won't your party come in?” she asked.

“Then,” he predicted, “after perhaps a little interregnum, during which they'll try a republic, Altronde will be noiselessly absorbed by the Kingdom of Italy.”

“History never speaks truth, and prophets (with the best will in the world) seldom do,” said Ponty. “Believe as much or as little of Bertram's vaticination as your fancy pleases. In a nation of hot-blooded Southrons like the Altrondesi, anything is possible. For my part, I shouldn't be surprised if their legitimate sovereign were recalled in triumph to-morrow.”

“Perish the thought,” cried Bertram, throwing up his hand, “unless you can provide a substitute to fill what would then become my highly uncomfortable situation.”

Ruth was looking curiously at Pontycroft. “What has History been doing,” she inquired, “to get into your bad graces?”

Pontycroft turned towards her, and made a portentous face.

“History,” he informed her in his deepest voice, “is the medium in which lies are preserved for posterity, just as flies are preserved in amber. History consists of the opinions formed by fallible and often foolish literary men from the testimony of fallible, contradictory, often dishonest, and rarely dispassionate witnesses. The witnesses, either with malice aforethought, or because their faculties are untrained, see falsely, malobserve; then they make false, or at best, faulty records of their malobservations. A century later comes your Historian; studies these false, faulty, contradictory records; picks and chooses among 'em; forms an opinion, the character of which will be entirely determined by his own character—his temperament, prejudices, kind and degree of intelligence, and so forth; and finally publishes his opinion under the title of The History of Ballywhack. But the history, please to remark, remains nothing more nor less than an exposition of the private views of Mr. Jones. And please to remark further that no two histories of Ballywhack will be in the least agreement—except upon unessentials. So that if Mr. Jones's history is true, those of Messrs. Brown and Robinson must necessarily be false. No, no, no; if you go to seek Truth in the printed page, seek it in novels, seek it in poems, seek it in fairy tales or fashion papers, but don't waste your time seeking it in histories.”

While the others greeted his peroration with some laughter, Pontycroft lighted a cigarette.

“I'm sure I'd much rather seek it in fashion papers,” drawled Lucilla. “They're so much lighter and easier to hold than great heavy history books, and besides they sometimes really give one ideas.”

“But don't, above all things,” put in Ruth, “seek it in a small volume which I am preparing for the press, and which is to be entitled, The Paradoxes of Pontycroft.”

IV

As Bertram walked back to Florence, down the steep, cobble-paved lanes, between the high villa walls, draped now with flowering cyclamen, while glimpses of the lily-city came and went before him, something like a phantom of Ruth Adgate floated by his side. Her voice was in his ears, the scent of her garments was in his nostrils; he saw her face, her eyes, her smiling red mouth, her fragile nervous body. “I have never met a woman who—who moved me so—troubled me so,” he said. “Is it possible that I am in love with her? Already?” It seemed premature, it seemed unlikely; yet why couldn't he get her from his mind?

Be thou chaste as ice, pure as snow, thou shalt not escape calumny. He thought as he had thought again and again to-day, of Mrs. Wilberton. “Just so certainly,” he argued, “as a woman is alone in the world, and young, and good-looking, just so certainly must slanderous tongues select her for their victim. Add wealth,—which trebles her conspicuousness,—which excites a thousand envies,—and—well, the Lord help her and those who profess themselves her friends. That exquisite young girl! Her fine old father was a moneylender, and she is paying the Pontycrofts to push her in society. Likely stories: Yet how are you to prevent people telling and believing them?”

He raised his hands towards the blue empyrean, and let them fall heavily back beside him, as one summoning angels and archangels to mark the relentless logic of evil. And the nine peasants who just then rattled past him in a cart drawn by a single donkey, rolled their eyes, and muttered among themselves, “Another mad Inglese.”

“But oh, ye Powers,” he groaned, groaned in the silence of his spirit, while audibly he laughed with laughter that really was sardonic, “if Ponty knew, if Ponty half suspected!” Pontycroft was a man with magnificent capacities for anger. If Pontycroft should come to know, as any day he might, as some day he almost inevitably must,—it was not pleasant to picture the rage that would fill him. And would it not extend, that rage of his, “to us, his friends,” Bertram had to ask himself, “for not having put him on his guard, for not having given him a hint?” Alas, it almost certainly would. “What! You, my friends, you heard the beastly things people were saying, and you never warned me—you left me in fatuous ignorance of them!” Yes; bitter, scathing, would be Pontycroft's reproaches; and yet, and yet—Imagining a little the case of the man who should undertake to convey that warning, Bertram was conscious of a painful inward chill. “It is not for me to do it—no, I should simply never have the courage.” The solution of the whole difficulty, of course, would be her marriage. “She should marry someone with a name and a position—a name and a position great enough in themselves to stifle scandal. If she should marry——” Well, a Prince of the house of Bertrandoni, for example.... But he did not get so far as quite to say these words. At the mere dim adumbration of the idea, he stopped short, stood still, and waited for his nerves to cease tingling, his heart to pound less violently.

“Is it conceivable that I am in love with a girl I've only seen twice in my life? And what manner of likelihood is there that she would have me? She refuses everyone, Ponty says; and that odious little Stuart Seton says she is in love with Ponty himself. No, I don't suppose I have the ghost of a chance. Still—still—she certainly didn't look or behave as if she was in love with Ponty; and that odious little Seton is just an odious little romancer; and as for her refusing everyone, tant va la cruche À l'eau——! Anyhow, a man may try, a man may pay his court. And if—But, good Heavens, I am forgetting my mother. What would my mother say?”

There were abundant reasons why the sudden recollection of his mother should give him pause. His mother was by no means simply the Duchess of Oltramare, the consort of the Pretender to a throne. She was something, to her own way of measuring, much greater than this: she was an Austrian and a Wohenhoffen. Mere Semi-Royal Bertrandoni, mere Dukes of Oltramare, mere Pretenders to the throne of Altronde, might marry whom they would; lineage, blood, quarterings, they might dispense with. But to a Wohenhoffen, to a noble of the noblesse of Austria, lineage, blood, quarterings were as essential as the breath of life. And Ruth Adgate was an American. And—have Americans quarterings? A daughter-in-law without them would, in all literalness, be less acceptable to his proud old Austrian Wohenhoffen of a mother, than a daughter-in-law without her five senses or without hands and feet; would be a thing, in fact, unthinkable. For people without quarterings, to the mind of your Austrian Wohenhoffens, constitute an entirely separate, not order, not estate, an entirely separate Race, an alien species, no more to be intermarried with than Esquimaux or Zulus.

Yes, there were plenty of reasons why the recollection of his mother should dash his soaring fancies. But fancies are stubborn things and by and bye they began anew to stir their pinions. True, his mother was an Austrian and a Wohenhoffen, yet at the same time she was the smiling embodiment of good-humour and good-nature, and she was the most sociable and the most susceptible soul alive,—she loved to be surrounded by amusing people, she formed the strongest friendships and attachments. If she were at Florence now, for example, and if the inhabitants of Villa Santa Cecilia were presented to her, she would take each of them to her heart. She would like Pontycroft, she would like Lucilla, above all she would like Ruth; she would like her for her youth and freshness, for her prettiness, for her gaiety, for everything. She would like her, too, because she was a Catholic, the Duchess of Oltramare being an exceedingly devout daughter of the Church. And it would never occur to her to ask whether she had quarterings or not—it would never occur to her that so nice a person could fail to have them. And then—and then, when the question of quarterings did arise—Well, even Austrians, even Wohenhoffens, might perhaps gradually be brought to accustom themselves to new ideas. And then—well, even to a Wohenhoffen, the fact that you possess a handsome fortune will by no means lessen your attractiveness.

“As I live,” cried this designing son, “I'll write to my mother to-night, and ask her to come to Florence.”

V

Of course, no sooner had Bertram left them, than Pontycroft turned to the ladies, and said, “Well——?”

“Well what?” teased Ruth, trying to look as if she didn't understand.

“Boo,” said Pontycroft, making a face at her.

“He's delightful,” said Lucilla; “so simple and unassuming, and unspoiled. And so romantic—like one of Daudet's rois en exil. And he has such nice eyes, and such a nice slim athletic figure. Do you think it's true that his people have no hope of coming to the throne? I've felt it in my bones that we should meet him again, ever since that night at the Lido. I knew it was all an act of Destiny. How wonderfully he speaks English—and thinks and feels it. He has quite the English point of view—he can see a joke. Oh, I've entirely lost my heart, and if I weren't restrained by a sense of my obligations as a married woman I should make the most frantic love to him.”

Ruth lay back in her chair, and shook her head, and laughed.

“Oh, your swans, your swans,” she murmured.

“Dear Lady Disdain,” said Ponty, regarding her with an eye that was meant to wither, “it is better that a thousand geese should be mistaken for swans, than that a single swan should be mistaken for a goose. Oh, your geese, your geese!”

“Dear Lord Sententious,” riposted Ruth, “what is the good of making any mistake at all? Why not take swans for swans, geese for geese, and blameless little princelings for blameless little princelings? Yes, your little princeling seemed altogether blameless, an exceedingly well-meaning, well-mannered little princeling, but I saw no play of Promethean fire about his head, and when he spoke it sounded as if any normally intelligent young man was speaking.”

“Had you expected,” Pontycroft with lofty sarcasm inquired, “that, like the prince in The Rose and Ring, he would speak in verse?”

But next morning, in the most unexpected manner, she totally changed her note. Pontycroft found her seated in the sun on the lawn. It was a cool morning, and the sun's warmth was pleasant. Here and there a dewdrop still glistened, clinging to a spear of grass; and the air was still sweet with the early breath of the earth. In her lap lay side by side an open letter and an oleander-blossom. Her eyes, Pontycroft perceived, were fixed upon the horizon, as those of one deep in a brown study.

“You mustn't mind my interrupting,” he said, as he came up. “It's really in your own interest. It's bad for your little brain to let it think so hard, and it will do you good to tell me what it was thinking so hard about.”

Slowly, calmly, Ruth raised her eyes to his. “My little brain was thinking about Prince Charming,” she apprised him, in a voice that sounded grave.

Pontycroft's wrinkled brow contracted.

“Prince Charming——?”

“The young Astyanax, the hope of—Altronde,” she explained. “Your friend, Bertrando Bertrandoni. I was meditating his manifold perfections.”

Pontycroft shook his head. “I miss the point of your irony,” he remarked.

“Irony?” protested she, with spirit. “When was I ever ironical? He's perfectly delightful—so unassuming and unspoiled; and so romantic, like a king in exile. And with such a nice thin figure, and such large sagacious eyes. And he speaks such chaste and classic English, and is so quick to take a joke. If I weren't restrained by a sense of what's becoming to me as a single woman, I should make desperate love to him.”

Pontycroft shook his head again. “I still miss the point,” he said.

“I express myself blunderingly, I know,” said Ruth. “You see, it's somewhat embarrassing for a girl to have to avow such sentiments. But really and truly and honestly, and all jesting apart, I think he's an extremely nice young man, quite the nicest that I've met for a long, long while.”

“You sang a different song yesterday,” said Pontycroft, bewilderment and suspicion mingled in his gaze.

“La nuit porte conseil,” Ruth reminded him. “I've had leisure in which to revise my impressions. He's a fellow who can talk, a fellow who's curious about things. I hope we shall see a great deal of him.” She lifted up her oleander, pressed it to her face, and took a deep inhalation. “Bless its red fragrant heart,” she said.

“I never can tell when you are sincere,” Ponty hopelessly complained.

“I'm always sincere—but seldom serious,” Ruth replied. “What's the good of being serious? Isn't levity the soul of wit? Come, come! Life's grim enough, in all conscience, without making it worse by being serious.”

“I give you up,” said Ponty. “You're in one of your mystifying moods, and your long-suffering friends must wait until it passes.” Then nodding towards the open letter in her lap, “Whom's your letter from?” he asked.

“I don't know,” said Ruth, smiling with what seemed to him artificial brightness.

“Don't know? Haven't you read it?” he demanded.

“Oh yes, I've read it. But I don't know whom it's from, because it isn't signed. It's what they call anonymous,” Ruth suavely answered. “Now isn't that exciting?”

“Anonymous?” cried Ponty, bristling up.

“Who on earth can be writing anonymous letters to a child like you? What's it about?”

“By the oddest of coincidences,” said Ruth, “it's about you.”

“About me?” Ponty faltered, a hundred new wrinkles adding themselves to his astonished brow: “An anonymous letter—to you—about me?”

“Yes,” said Ruth pleasantly. “Would you care to read it?” She held it up to him. He took it.

Written in a weak and sprawling hand, clearly feminine, on common white paper, it ran, transliterated into the conventional spelling of our day, as follows:—

“Miss Ruth Adgate, Madam.—I thought you might like to know that your friend, H. Pontycroft, Esq. who passes himself off for a bachelor is a married man, eighteen years ago being married privately to a lady whose father kept a public in Brighton of the name of Ethel Driver. The lady lives at 18 Spring Villas Beckenham Road Highgate off a mean pittance from her husband who is ashamed of her and long ago cast off.

“Yours, a sincere well-wisher.”

Pontycroft's wrinkles, as he read, concentrated themselves into one frown of anger, and the brown-red of his face darkened to something like purple. At last he tore the letter lengthwise and crosswise into tiny fragments, and thrust them into the side pocket of his coat.

“Let me see the envelope,” he said, reaching out his hand. But there was nothing to be got from the envelope. It was postmarked Chelsea, and had been addressed to Ruth's house in town, and thence forwarded by her servants.

“Who could have written it? And why? Why?” he puzzled aloud.

“The writer thought I 'might like to know,'” said Ruth, quoting the text from memory. “But, of course, it's none of my business—so I don't ask whether it is true.”

“No, it's none of your business,” Ponty agreed, smiling upon her gravely, his anger no longer uppermost. “But I hope you won't quite believe the part about the 'pittance.' My solicitors pay all her legitimate expenses, and if I don't allow her any great amount of actual money, that's because she has certain unfortunate habits which it's better for her own sake that she shouldn't indulge too freely. Well, well, you see how the sins of our youth pursue us. And now—shall we speak of something else?”

“Poor Harry,” said Ruth, looking at him with eyes of tender pity. “Speak of something else? Oh yes, by all means,” she assented briskly. “Let's return to Astyanax. When do you think he will pay his visit of digestion?”