row the first hour after the wedding.  Anyhow, something happened; he went off the same day and left her with her mother.  Afterward, he came back; but it was an open secret that the two were no more than strangers, or, you might say, polite acquaintances, though they lived at opposite ends of his palace in Rome, which her money restored, and his country place near Frascati.  There was never the least scandal, only wild curiosity.  Now she has cut the whole thing.  Apparently couldn’t stand the empty sort of life, or else he did something worse than usual, at which she drew the line.”

Angela did not much care whether people in Rome knew the truth or not.  That no longer greatly mattered to her, because she meant never, never to go back to Rome, or to see Paolo di Sereno, or any of his friends—­who had never really been her friends.  But she did not want people on the ship to know, because she was tired of being talked about, and her hope was to begin a new and different life.  For herself, she had nothing to conceal; but, she had never felt any pride or pleasure in being a princess, and after the flatteries and disillusions, the miseries and foolish extravagances of the last hateful, brilliant six years, everything connected with them, and the historic title her dead father’s money had bought, was being eagerly obliterated by Franklin Merriam’s daughter.  She knew little about her forebears on her father’s side, except that they were English, whereas Paolo had centuries behind him crammed full of glorious ancestors whose deeds were celebrated on tapestries of great beauty and value.  Her one tolerable memory of Paolo was that he had never touched her hand since their marriage; but the memory of her father was sacred.  She adored him, and was never weary of recalling things he had said to her, pleasures he had planned for her as a child, and, above all, his stories of California, whither she was now bound.

Angela had taken the name of “Mrs. May”; May, because May was her birth-month, and also her middle name given by her father, whereas Angela had been her mother’s choice.  Therefore she was just superstitious enough to feel that “May” might bring happiness, since her father’s memory was the single unshadowed spot in her life of twenty-three years.  A brilliant life it would have seemed to most women, one to be envied; but Angela could not see why.

The lashes which shaded her slate-gray eyes had that upward curl which shows an undying sense of humour, and she had been a merry little girl, with flashes of wit which had enchanted Franklin Merriam before she was snatched away to Europe at eleven, never to see him again.  Even at school where she had been “dumped” (as Mrs. Merriam’s intimate enemies put it), Angela had kept the girls laughing.  Now, though she had imagined her gay spirit dead with childhood, she began to be visited by its ghost.  She amused herself on shipboard with a thousand things, and a thousand thoughts which made her feel the best of “chums” with her new friend and companion, Angela May.  “I’ve come back from twenty-three to seventeen,” she thought, and pretended that there had never been an Angela di Sereno, that scornful young person who had forbidden the prince to come near her on learning that there was another whom he should have married instead of Millionaire Merriam’s daughter.