“Well, well!  I’m very much obliged to you, very much, indeed; and I’m sure my daughter is.”

The girl said, “Oh yes, indeed,” rather indifferently, and then as they passed him, while he stood lifting his hat, she turned radiantly on him.  “Thank you, ever so much!” she said, with the gentle voice which he had already thought charming.

The father called back:  “I hope we shall meet again.  We are going to the Sardegna.”

Lanfear had been going to the Sardegna himself, but while he bowed he now decided upon another hotel.

The mystery, whatever it was, that the brave, little, fat father was carrying off so bluffly, had clearly the morbid quality of unhealth in it, and Lanfear could not give himself freely to a young pleasure in the girl’s dark beauty of eyes and hair, her pale, irregular, piquant face, her slender figure and flowing walk.  He was in the presence of something else, something that appealed to his scientific side, to that which was humane more than that which was human in him, and abashed him in the other feeling.  Unless she was out of her mind there was no way of accounting for her behavior, except by some caprice which was itself scarcely short of insanity.  She must have thought she knew him when he approached, and when she addressed him those first words; but when he had tried to set her right she had not changed; and why had she denied her father, and then hailed him with joy when he came back to her?  She had known that she intended to stop at San Remo, but she had not known where she had stopped when she asked what place it was.  She was consciously an invalid of some sort, for she spoke of getting well under sunsets like that which had now waned, but what sort of invalid was she?

II

Lanfear’s question persisted through the night, and it helped, with the coughing in the next room, to make a bad night for him.  None of the hotels in San Remo receive consumptive patients, but none are without somewhere a bronchial cough.  If it is in the room next yours it keeps you awake, but it is not pulmonary; you may comfort yourself in your vigils with that fact.  Lanfear, however, fancied he had got a poor dinner, and in the morning he did not like his coffee.  He thought he had let a foolish scruple keep him from the Grand Hotel Sardegna, and he walked down towards it along the palm-flanked promenade, in the gay morning light, with the tideless sea on the other hand lapping the rough beach beyond the lines of the railroad which borders it.  On his way he met files of the beautiful Ligurian women, moving straight under the burdens balanced on their heads, or bestriding the donkeys laden with wine-casks in the roadway, or following beside the carts which the donkeys drew.  Ladies of all nations, in the summer fashions of London, Berlin, St. Petersburg, Paris, and New York thronged the path.  The sky was of a blue so deep, so liquid that it seemed to