Lanfear rose, too.  He said, with returning kindness in his tones, if not his words:  “I should like to study the case, Mr. Gerald.  It’s very interesting, and—­and—­if you’ll forgive me—­very touching.”

“Thank you.”

“If you decide to stay in San Remo, I will—­Do you suppose I could get a room in this hotel?  I don’t like mine.”

“Why, I haven’t any doubt you can.  Shall we ask?”

III

It was from the Hotel Sardegna that Lanfear satisfied his conscience by pushing his search for climate on behalf of his friend’s neurasthenic wife.  He decided that Ospedaletti, with a milder air and more sheltered seat in its valley of palms, would be better for her than San Remo.  He wrote his friend to that effect, and then there was no preoccupation to hinder him in his devotion to the case of Miss Gerald.  He put the case first in the order of interest rather purposely, and even with a sense of effort, though he could not deny to himself that a like case related to a different personality might have been less absorbing.  But he tried to keep his scientific duty to it pure of that certain painful pleasure which, as a young man not much over thirty, he must feel in the strange affliction of a young and beautiful girl.

Though there was no present question of medicine, he could be installed near her, as the friend that her father insisted upon making him, without contravention of the social formalities.  His care of her hardly differed from that of her father, except that it involved a closer and more premeditated study.  They did not try to keep her from the sort of association which, in a large hotel of the type of the Sardegna, entails no sort of obligation to intimacy.  They sat together at the long table, midway of the dining-room, which maintained the tradition of the old table-d’hote against the small tables ranged along the walls.  Gerald had an amiable old man’s liking for talk, and Lanfear saw that he willingly escaped, among their changing companions, from the pressure of his anxieties.  He left his daughter very much to Lanfear, during these excursions, but Lanfear was far from meaning to keep her to himself.  He thought it better that she should follow her father in his forays among their neighbors, and he encouraged her to continue such talk with them as she might be brought into.  He tried to guard her future encounters with them, so that she should not show more than a young girl’s usual diffidence at a second meeting; and in the frequent substitution of one presence for another across the table, she was fairly safe.