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So far indeed as allusions to the past were concerned, the three might just have travelled together from Marinata. Eleanor very flushed, and dressed in her elegant white dress and French hat, talked fast and well, of the country folk, the padre parroco, the Contessa. Lucy looked at her with alarm, dreading the after fatigue. But Eleanor would not be managed; would have her way.

'I trust he is well, Madame? Eleanor flushed. 'I believe so. He and Miss Manisty are still at Marinata. Father Benecke! 'Madame? Eleanor turned aside, poking at the stones on the road with her parasol. 'You would do me a kindness if for the present you would not mention my being here to any of your friends in Rome, to to anybody, in fact.

Lucy looked back with a pang to Marinata, and to the indulgent pleasure that Eleanor had once taken in all the many-coloured show of Catholicism. Now she was always weary, and often fretful. It struck Lucy too that she was more restless than ever. She seemed to take no notice of the present to be always living in the future expecting, listening, waiting.

She secured an early train for the return to Marinata, and so earned a special and approving smile from Mr. Reggie, when at last he had settled the three ladies safely in their carriage, and was raising his hat to them on the platform. Manisty and Mr. Neal were to follow by a later train.

Eleanor drove out once more towards the Alban hills; she looked once more on the slopes of Marinata and the white crown of Monte Cavo; the Roman sunshine shed round her once more its rich incomparable light. In December Manisty and Lucy were expected; but a week before they came she died.

Marinata has no malaria; but on old soils, and as night approaches, there is always something in the shade of Italy that fights with human life. The poor ghosts rise from the earth jealous of those that are still walking the warm ways of the world.

The sister had come to Marinata in order to persuade her brother, as one of the trustees of her property, to co-operate with her in bestowing some of her money on the French artist, Monsieur Octave Vacherot, to whom, as she calmly avowed, her affections were indissolubly attached, though she did not ever intend to marry him, nor indeed to see much of him in the future.

Surely this hot evening and their shabby carriage and the dusty unfamiliar road were all dream-stuff an illusion from which she was to wake directly and find herself once more in her room at Marinata, looking out on Monte Cavo?

The party returning to Marinata had two hours to spend in the gallery and garden of the Villa Borghese. Of the pictures and statues of the palace, of the green undulations, the stone pines, the tempietti of the garden, Lucy afterwards had no recollection. All that she remembered was flight on her part, pursuit on Manisty's, and finally a man triumphant and a girl brought to bay.

Because it had taken them three months to make the Marinata villa decently habitable, was that any reason for tempting the wilderness again? Lucy, too, had her misgivings. Nominally she was travelling, she supposed, under Eleanor Burgoyne's chaperonage. Really she was the guardian of the whole party, and she was conscious of a tender and anxious responsibility.