Peter Champneys?  Marcia scented disruption, where that impalpable relationship was concerned.  She was ignorant as to Anne’s real feelings and intentions in regard to her absentee husband.  Anne never mentioned him.  She bore his name, she held herself rigidly aloof from all lovers; herein one saw her sole concessions to the tie binding her.  Marcia didn’t see how it was possible that the two should avoid hating each other; the mere fact that they had been arbitrarily forced upon each other by the imperious will of old Chadwick, would inevitably militate against any hope of future affection between them.  And now here was Berkeley Hayden, quite as imperious as Chadwick Champneys had ever been, and who was quite as successful in getting what he wanted.

Anne had welcomed Mr. Hayden gladly.  She was honestly delighted to see him.  Florence had taught her, signally, the depths of her own lack of culture, and this biting knowledge increased her respect for Mr. Berkeley Hayden.  Marcia was immensely clever, charmingly cultivated, a woman of the world in the best sense, but Anne’s native shrewdness told her that Marcia’s knowledge was not equal to Hayden’s.  His culture was surer and deeper.  He was more than a mere amateur; he knew.  He stood apart, in her mind, and just a little higher than anybody else.  She turned to him eagerly, and there was established between them, almost unconsciously, the most potent, perfect, and dangerous of all relationships, because it is the most beautiful and natural,—­that, in which the man is the teacher and the woman the pupil.

Hayden saw her, too, to greater advantage, here under this Florentine sky, against the background of perhaps the most beautiful city in the world.  She glowed, splendidly young and vivid.  She did not laugh often, but when she did, it was like a peal of music; it came straight from her heart and went direct to yours.  It was as catching as fire, as exhilarating as the chime of sleigh-bells on a frosty Thanksgiving morning, as clear and true as a redbird’s whistle; and it had tucked away in it a funny, throaty chuckle so irresistibly infectious that suspicious old St. Anthony himself, would have joined in accord with it, had he heard its silver echo in his wilderness.  Berkeley Hayden’s immortal soul stood on the tiptoe of ecstasy when Anne Champneys laughed.

She no longer thought of herself as Nancy Simms; she knew herself now as Anne Champneys, a newer and better personality dominating that old, unhappy, ignorant self.  If at times the man glimpsed that other shadowy self of hers, it was part of her mysterious appeal, her enthralling, baffling charm.  It invested her with a shade of inscrutable, prescient sorrow, as of old unhappy far-off things.  He hadn’t the faintest idea of Nancy Simms, a creature utterly foreign to his experience.  And because she did not love him, Anne Champneys never spoke of that old self, never confided in him.  He did not know