The success of this move had gone far beyond Mr. Courtenay’s highest hopes. He was unprepared for the suddenness of its acceptance. He went off and told Lady Caryisfort, with a surprise and satisfaction that was almost rueful. ‘Since that woman came into my niece’s affairs,’ he said, ‘I have had to sacrifice something for every step I have gained; and I find that I have made the sacrifice exactly when it suited her—to buy a concession she was dying to make. I never meant her to set foot in Langton, and now she is going there as mistress; and just, I am certain, at the time it suits her to go. This is what happens to a simple-minded man when he ventures to enter the lists with women. I have a great mind to put everything in her hands and retire from the field.’

‘I don’t think she is so clever as you give her credit for,’ said Lady Caryisfort, who was somewhat languid after the night’s exertions. ‘I suspect it was you who found out the moment that suited you rather than she.’

But she gave him, in her turn, an account of what she had done, and they formed an alliance offensive and defensive—a public treaty of friendship for the world’s inspection, and a secret alliance known only to themselves, by the conditions of which Lady Caryisfort bound herself to repair to London and take Kate under her charge when it should be thought necessary and expedient by the allied powers. She pledged herself to present the heiress and watch over her and guard her from all match-makers, that the humble chaperon might be dismissed, and allowed to go in peace. When he had concluded this bargain Mr. Courtenay went away with a lighter heart, to make preparations for his niece’s return. He had been most successful in his pretence to get her away from Florence; and now this second arrangement to get rid of the relations who would be no longer necessary, seemed to him a miracle of diplomacy. He chuckled to himself over it, and rubbed his hands.

‘Kate must not be treated as a child any longer—she is grown up, she has a judgment of her own,’ he said, with a delicious sense of humour; and then he listened very gravely to all her enthusiastic descriptions of what she was to do when she got to Langton. Kate, however, after the first glow of her resolution, did not feel the matter so easy as it appeared. She had no thought of the violets, which Francesca swept up, at the moment; but afterwards the recollection of them came back to her. She had allowed them to be swept away without a thought. What a cold heart—what an ungrateful nature—she must have! And poor Antonio! In the light of Langton, Antonio looked to her all at once impossible—as impossible as it would be to transplant his old palace to English soil. No way could the two ideas be harmonised. She puckered her brows over it till she made her head ache. Count Buoncompagni and Langton-Courtenay! They would not come together—could not—it was impossible! Indeed the one idea chased the other from her mind. And how was she to intimate this strange and cruel fact to him? How was she to show that all his graceful attentions must be brought to an end?—that she was going home, and all must be over! And the worst was that it could not be done gradually; but one way or another must be managed at once.

The next day Lady Caryisfort came, as usual, on her way to the Cascine; but, to Kate’s surprise and relief, and, it must be owned, also to her disappointment, Antonio was not there. She declined the next invitation to Lady Caryisfort’s, inventing a headache for the occasion, and growing more and more perplexed the longer she thought over that difficult matter. It was while she was musing thus that Bertie Hardwick one day managed to get beside her for a moment, while Ombra was talking to his cousin. Bertie Eldridge had raised a discussion about some literary matter, and the two had gone to consult a book in the little ante-room, which served as a kind of library; the other Bertie was left alone with Kate, a thing which had not happened before for weeks. He went up to her the moment they were gone, and stood hesitating and embarrassed before her.

‘Miss Courtenay,’ he said, and waited till she looked up.

Something moved in Kate’s heart at the sound of his voice—some chord of early recollection—remembrances which seemed to her to stretch so far back—before the world began.

‘Well, Mr. Hardwick?’ she said, looking up with a smile. Why there should be something pathetic in that smile, and a little tightness across her eyelids, as if she could have cried, Kate could not have told, and neither can I.

‘Are you pleased to go home?—is it with your own will? or did your uncle’s coming distress you?’ he said, in a voice which was—yes, very kind, almost more than friendly; brotherly, Kate said to herself.

‘Distress me?’ she said.

‘Yes; I have thought you looked a little troubled sometimes. I can’t help noticing. Don’t think me impertinent, but I can’t bear to see trouble in your face.’

Kate made no reply, but she looked up at him—looked him straight in the eyes. Once more she did not know why she did it, and she did not think of half the meanings which he saw written in her face. He faltered; he turned away; he grew red and grew pale; and then came back to her with an answering look which did not falter; but for the re-entrance of the others he must have said something. But they came back, and he did not speak. If he had spoken, what would he have said?

This gave a new direction to Kate’s thoughts, but still it was with a heavy heart that she entered Lady Caryisfort’s drawing-room, not more than a week after that evening when Antonio had asked for the violets, and she had hesitated whether she would give them. She had hesitated! It was this thought which made her so much ashamed. She had been lonely, and she had been willing to accept his heart as a plaything; and how could she say to him now, ‘I am no longer lonely. I am going home; and I could not take you, a stranger, back, to be master of Langton?’ She could not say this, and what was she to say? Antonio Buoncompagni was not much more comfortable; he had been thoroughly schooled, and he had begun to accept his part. He even saw, and that clearly, that a pretty, independent bird in the hand, able to pipe as he wished, was better than a fluttering, uncertain fledgling in the bush; but he had a lively sense of honour, and he had committed himself. The young lady, he thought, ought at least to have the privilege of refusing him. ‘Go, then, and be refused—pazzo!’ said his aunt. ‘Most people avoid a refusal, but thou wishest it. It is a pity that thou shouldst not be satisfied.’ But, having obtained this permission, the young Count was not, perhaps, so ready to avail himself of it. He did not care to be rejected any more than other men, but he was anxious to reconcile his conscience to his desertion; and he had a tender sense that he himself—Antonio—was not one to be easily forgotten. He watched Kate from the moment of her entry, and persuaded himself that she was pale. ‘Poverina!’ he said, beneath his moustache. Alas! the sacrifice must be made; but then it might be done in a gentle way.

The evening, however, was half over before he had found his way to her side—a circumstance which filled Kate with wonder, and kept her in a curious suspense; for she could not talk freely to anyone else while he was within sight, to whom she had so much (she thought) to say. He came, and Kate was confused and troubled. Somehow she felt he was changed. Was he less handsome, less tall, less graceful? What had happened to him? Surely there was something. He was no longer the young hero who had dropped on his knee, and kissed her hand for Italy. She was confused, and could not tell how it was.

‘You are going to leave Florence?’ he said. ‘It is sudden—it is too sad to think of. Miss Courtenay, I hope it is not you who wish to leave our beautiful Italy—you, who have understood her so well?’

‘No, it is not I,’ said Kate. ‘I should not have gone of my own free will; but yet I am very willing—I am ready to go—it is home,’ she added, hastily, and with meaning. ‘It is the place I love best in the world.’

‘Ah!’ he said, ‘I had thought—I had hoped you loved Italy too.’

‘Oh! so I do, Count Buoncompagni—and I thought I did still more,’ cried the girl, eager to make her hidden and shy, yet brave apology. ‘I thought I could have lived and died here, where people were so good to me. But, you know, whenever I heard the name of home, it made my blood all dance in my veins. I felt I had been making a mistake, and that there was nothing in the world I loved like Langton-Courtenay. I made a great mistake, but I did not mean it. I hope nobody will think it is unkind of me, or that I am fond of change.’

Count Antonio stood and listened to this speech with a grim smile on his face, and a look in his eyes which was new to Kate. He, too, was making a disagreeable discovery, and he did not like it. He made her a bow, but he did not make any answer. He stood by her side a few moments, and then he asked her suddenly, ‘May I get you some tea?—can I bring you anything?’ with a forced quietness; and when Kate said ‘No,’ he went away, and devoted himself for all the rest of the evening to Lady Caryisfort. There was pique in his manner, but there was something more, which she could not make out; and she sat rather alone for the rest of the evening. She was left to feel her mistake, to wonder, to be somewhat offended and affronted; and went back to the Lung-Arno impatient to hurry over all the packing, and get home at once. But she never found out that in thus taking the weight of the breaking off on her own shoulders, she had saved Count Antonio a great deal of trouble.

When Lady Caryisfort found out what had passed, her amusement was very great. ‘She will go now and think all her life that she has done him an injury, and broken his heart, and all kinds of nonsense,’ she said to herself. ‘Poor Antonio! what a horrible thing money is! But he has escaped very cheaply, thanks to Kate, and she will make a melancholy hero of him, poor dear child, for the rest of her life.’

In this, however, Lady Caryisfort, not knowing all the circumstances, was wrong; for Kate felt vaguely that there was something more than the honourable despair of a young Paladin in her Count’s acceptance of her explanation. He accepted it too readily, with too little attempt to resist or remonstrate. She was more angry than pitiful, ignorant as she was. A man who takes a woman so entirely at her first word almost insults her, even though the separation is her own doing. Kate felt this vaguely, and a hot blush rose to her cheek for two or three days after, at the very mention of Antonio’s name.

The person, however, who felt this breaking off most was old Francesca, who had gone to an extra mass for weeks back, to promote the suit she had so much at heart. She cried herself sick when she saw it was all over, and said to herself, she knew something evil would happen as soon as il vecchio came. Il vecchio’s appearance was always the signal for mischief. He had come, and now once more the party was on the wing, and she herself was to be torn from her native place, the Florence she adored, for this old man’s caprice. Francesca thought with a little fierce satisfaction that, when his soul went to purgatory, there would be nobody to pray him out, and that his penance would be long enough. The idea gave her a great deal of satisfaction. She would not help him out, she was certain—not so much as by a single prayer.

But all the time she got on with her packing, and the ladies began to frequent the shops to buy little souvenirs of Florence. It was a busy time, and there was a great deal of movement, and so much occupation that the members of the little party lost sight of each other, as it were, and pursued their different preparations in their own way. ‘She is packing,’ or, ‘she is shopping,’ was said, first of one, and then of another; and no further questions were asked. And thus the days crept on, and the time approached when they were to set out once more on the journey home.