Undine’s face brightened.  “You know he’s not a Count; he’s a Marquis.  His name’s Roviano; his palace in Rome is in the guide-books, and he speaks English beautifully.  Celeste found out about him from the headwaiter,” she said, with the security of one who treats of recognized values.

Marvell, sitting upright, reached lazily across the grass for his hat.  “Then there’s all the more reason for rushing back to defend our share.”  He spoke in the bantering tone which had become the habitual expression of his tenderness; but his eyes softened as they absorbed in a last glance the glimmering submarine light of the ancient grove, through which Undine’s figure wavered nereid-like above him.

“You never looked your name more than you do now,” he said, kneeling at her side and putting his arm about her.  She smiled back a little vaguely, as if not seizing his allusion, and being content to let it drop into the store of unexplained references which had once stimulated her curiosity but now merely gave her leisure to think of other things.  But her smile was no less lovely for its vagueness, and indeed, to Ralph, the loveliness was enhanced by the latent doubt.  He remembered afterward that at that moment the cup of life seemed to brim over.

“Come, dear—­here or there—­it’s all divine!”

In the carriage, however, she remained insensible to the soft spell of the evening, noticing only the heat and dust, and saying, as they passed under the wooded cliff of Lecceto, that they might as well have stopped there after all, since with such a headache as she felt coming on she didn’t care if she dined or not.  Ralph looked up yearningly at the long walls overhead; but Undine’s mood was hardly favourable to communion with such scenes, and he made no attempt to stop the carriage.  Instead he presently said:  “If you’re tired of Italy, we’ve got the world to choose from.”

She did not speak for a moment; then she said:  “It’s the heat I’m tired of.  Don’t people generally come here earlier?”

“Yes.  That’s why I chose the summer:  so that we could have it all to ourselves.”

She tried to put a note of reasonableness into her voice.  “If you’d told me we were going everywhere at the wrong time, of course I could have arranged about my clothes.”

“You poor darling!  Let us, by all means, go to the place where the clothes will be right:  they’re too beautiful to be left out of our scheme of life.”

Her lips hardened.  “I know you don’t care how I look.  But you didn’t give me time to order anything before we were married, and I’ve got nothing but my last winter’s things to wear.”

Ralph smiled.  Even his subjugated mind perceived the inconsistency of Undine’s taxing him with having hastened their marriage; but her variations on the eternal feminine still enchanted him.

“We’ll go wherever you please—­you make every place the one place,” he said, as if he were humouring an irresistible child.