“Miss Gerald,” the father corrected him as he took the cards.  “Why, hello, Nannie!  Here are the Bells!  Where are they?” he demanded of the waiter.  “Bring them here, and a lot more cups and saucers.  Or, hold on!  I’d better go myself, Nannie, hadn’t I?  Of course!  You get the crockery, waiter.  Where did you say they were?” He bustled up from his chair, without waiting for a distinct reply, and apologized to Lanfear in hurrying away.  “You’ll excuse me, doctor!  I’ll be back in half a minute.  Friends of ours that came over on the same boat.  I must see them, of course, but I don’t believe they’ll stay.  Nannie, don’t let Dr. Lanfear get away.  I want to have some talk with him.  You tell him he’d better come to the Sardegna, here.”

Lanfear and Miss Gerald sat a moment in the silence which is apt to follow with young people when they are unexpectedly left to themselves.  She kept absently pushing the cards her father had given her up and down on the table between her thumb and forefinger, and Lanfear noted the translucence of her long, thin hand in the sunshine striking across the painted iron surface of the garden movable.  The translucence had a pathos for his intelligence which the pensive tilt of her head enhanced.  She stopped toying with the cards, and looked at the addresses on them.

“What strange things names are!” she said, as if musing on the fact, with a sigh which he thought disproportioned to the depth of her remark.

“They seem rather irrelevant at times,” he admitted, with a smile.  “They’re mere tags, labels, which can be attached to one as well as another; they seem to belong equally to anybody.”

“That is what I always say to myself,” she agreed, with more interest than he found explicable.

“But finally,” he returned, “they’re all that’s left us, if they’re left themselves.  They are the only signs to the few who knew us that we ever existed.  They stand for our characters, our personality, our mind, our soul.”

She said, “That is very true,” and then she suddenly gave him the cards.  “Do you know these people?”

“I?  I thought they were friends of yours,” he replied, astonished.

[Illustration:  A lively matron, of as youthful A temperament as the lively girls she brought in her train, burst upon them]

“That is what papa thinks,” Miss Gerald said, and while she sat dreamily absent, a rustle of skirts and a flutter of voices pierced from the surrounding shrubbery, and then a lively matron, of as youthful a temperament as the lively girls she brought in her train, burst upon them, and Miss Gerald was passed from one embrace to another until all four had kissed her.  She returned their greeting, and shared, in her quieter way, their raptures at their encounter.