He saw her at breakfast the next morning; and again, later, sitting on a deck-chair, with a book.

Once more he cursed his folly of the previous evening. A word or two then, no matter how trivial their utterance, and the barriers of convention would have been passed. Even should Fate throw a like opportunity in his path again, it was entirely improbable that she would choose the same hour. She is ever chary of exact repetitions. And, if his stammering tongue failed in speech with the soft darkness to cover its shyness, how was it likely it would find utterance in the broad light of day? The Moment—he spelled it with a capital—had passed, and would never again recur. Therefore he seated himself on his own deck-chair, some twenty paces from her, and began to fill his pipe, gloomily enough. Yet, in spite of gloom, he watched her,—surreptitiously of course. There was no ill-bred staring in his survey.

She was again dressed in black, but this time the lace ruffles had given place to soft white muslin cuffs and collar. Her dark hair was covered by a broad-brimmed black hat. She was leaning back in her chair as she read, the book lying on her lap. Suddenly the gravity of her face relaxed. A smile rippled across it like a little breeze across the surface of some lake. The smile broke into silent laughter. Antony found himself smiling in response.

She looked up from her book, and out over the sun-kissed water, the amusement still trembling on her lips and dancing in her eyes.

“I wonder,” reflected Antony watching her, “what she has been reading.”

For some ten minutes she sat gazing at the sunshine. Then she rose from her chair, placed her book upon it, and went towards the stairway which led to the lower deck.

Antony looked at the empty chair—empty, that is, except for a pale blue cushion and a deeper blue book. On the back of the chair, certain letters were painted,—P. di D.

Antony surveyed them gravely. The first letter really engrossed his attention. The last was merely an adjunct. The first would represent—or should represent—the real woman. He marshalled every possibility before him, merely to dismiss them: Patience, Phyllis, Prudence, Priscilla, Perpetua, Penelope, Persis, Phoebe, Pauline,—none were to his mind. The last appeared to him the most possible, and yet it did not truly belong. So he summed up its fitness. Yet, for the life of him, he could find no other. He had run through the whole gamut attached to the initial, so he told himself. Curiosity, or interest, call it what you will, fell back baffled.

He got up from his chair, and began to pace the deck. Passing her chair, he gazed again upon the letters painted thereon, as if challenging them to disclose the secret. Inscrutable, they stared back blankly at him.

Turning for the third time, he perceived that she had returned on deck. She was carrying a small bag of old gold brocade. She was in the chair once more as he came alongside of her; but the blue book had slipped to the ground. He bent to pick it up, involuntarily glancing at the title as he handed it to her. Dream Days. It fitted into his imaginings of her.

“Do you know it?” she queried, noticing his glance.

“No,” replied Antony, turning the book in his hands.

“Oh, but you should,” she smiled back at him. “That is if you have the smallest memory of your own childhood. I was just laughing over ‘death letters’ ten minutes ago.”

“Death letters?” queried Antony perplexed, the while his heart was singing a little pÆan of joy at the vagaries of Fate’s methods.

“Yes; a will or testament. But a death letter is so infinitely more explanatory. Don’t you think, so?”

Antony laughed.

“Of course,” he agreed, light breaking in upon him.

“Take the book if you care to,” she said. “I know it nearly by heart. But I had it by me, and brought it on deck to look at it again. I didn’t want to get absorbed in anything entirely new. It takes one’s mind from all this, and seems a loss.” A little gesture indicated sunshine, sea, and sky.

“Yes,” agreed Antony, “it’s waste of time to read in the open.” And then he stopped. “Oh, I didn’t mean—” he stammered, glancing down at the book, and perceiving ungraciousness in his words.

“Oh, yes, you did,” she assured him smiling, “and it was quite true, and not in the least rude. Read it in your berth some time; you can do it there with an easy conscience.”

She gave him a little nod, which might have been considered dismissal or a hint of emphasis. Antony, being of course aware that she could not possibly find it the same pleasure to talk to him as he found it to talk to her, took it as dismissal. With a word of thanks he moved off down the deck, the blue book in his hands.

He found a retired spot forward on the boat. A curious shyness prevented him from returning to his own deck-chair, and reading the book within sight of her. In spite of his little remark against reading in the open, he was longing to make himself acquainted with the contents immediately. Had it not been her recommendation? Death letters! He laughed softly and joyously. He had never even given the things a thought before, and here, twice within ten days, they had been brought to his notice in a fashion that, to his mind, fell little short of the miraculous. And it is not at all certain that he did not consider their second queer little entry on the scene the more miraculous of the two.

He opened the book, and there, facing him from the fly-leaf, was the answer to the question he had erstwhile sought to fathom,—Pia di Donatello. His lips formed the syllables, dwelling with pleasure on the first three little letters—Pia. Oh, it was right, it was utterly and entirely right. Every other possibility vanished before it into the remotest background, unthinkable in the face of what was. Pia di Donatello! Again he repeated the musical syllables. And yet—and yet—he’d have sworn she was English. There wasn’t the faintest trace of a foreign accent in her speech. If anything, there was a hint of Irish,—the soft intonation of the Emerald Isle. Her colouring, too, was Irish, the blue-black hair, the dark violet eyes—he had discovered that they were violet; looking, for all the world, as if they had been put in with a smutty finger, as the saying goes. He revolved the problem in his mind, and a moment later came upon the solution, so he told himself. An Irish mother, and an Italian father, so he decreed, metaphorically patting himself on the back the while for his perspicacity.

The problem settled, he turned himself to the contents of the book as set forth by the author thereof, rather than the three words inscribed on the fly-leaf by the owner. They were not hard of digestion. The print was large, the matter light. Anon he came to Mutabile Semper and the death letters, and, having read them, and laughed in concord with the erstwhile laugh of the book’s owner, he closed the pages, and gazed out upon the sunshine and the water.