“Gently,” exclaimed Mrs. Dennis, as she blew out Harwood’s poised and lighted match.  “You surely don’t imagine Crocker will propose the very day she shows it to him.”

“My dear,” protested Dennis, “don’t we all know him well enough to understand that any shock will produce that effect?  If his mother died or his horse, his vines got the scale, his Ghirlandaio sprung a crack, his university gave him an honorary degree—­these would all be reasons for proposing to Emma.  Dear old Crocker is like that; any jolt would affect him that way.”

“Has it occurred to anybody that Emma may have foreseen just this complication and quietly got rid of it first?” suggested Mrs. Dennis, the really practical member of our group, adding, “That’s how I’d have served you if I’d wanted him.”

“Never,” responded Dennis.  “She loves it too well, and then she would feel we felt she had spirited it away on purpose.”

“Besides,” continued Harwood, whose buried aspirations Emmawards had long ago flowered into a minute analysis of her moods, “she is true blue, you know.  She will never serve us like that.  She may immolate the mighty Crocker upon the altar of our collective curiosity, but she will never dodge us.”

“Cannot we all go back to our own countries and leave them alone,” suggested Frau Stern almost tearfully; “but no; we no longer haf countries.  Here we belong; elsewhere the air is too strong for our little lungs.  I pity us, and I pity more those poor young people.  If only they will but haf the sense to trample on our talk.”

“That, too, would be a sensation,” Dennis added cheerfully, and we went our ways, as usual, without having reached anything so vulgar as a conclusion.

* * * * *

Meanwhile Emma Verplanck stood in the loggia of her tiny villa and winced in the focus of the curiosities she despised.  She scanned the white road that rimmed her valley before descending sharply to Florence beyond the hill, and especially the crescent of dust where an approaching figure would first appear.  Now and then, as if for a rest, her eye traced the line of flaming willows down toward the plunge of her brook into the larger valley, or the file of spectral poplars that led into the vineyards hanging on the declivity of Fiesole.  Above all, the gaunt and gashed bulk of Monte Ceceri glistened hotly against a pale blue sky, for if it was a backward April, the first stirring of summer was already in the air.  She thrilled with disgust as she asked herself why she dreaded this call.  Why should she fear lest an elementary test, a very simple explanation such as she planned for that afternoon, should compromise an established friendship?