“It is nothing,” she answered, and then laughed nervously.  “I am glad you have made your stepfather go away.  It was time!  I was afraid you were as good friends as ever.”

“We have not been on good terms since we parted in Pontresina.  Do you remember when I left him in your sitting-room at the hotel?  He had been trying to persuade me to go back to Paris with him at once.  In fact—­” he hesitated.

“You intended to go,” Aurora said, completing the sentence.  “And then you changed your mind.”

“Yes.  I could not do it.  I cannot explain everything.”

“I understand without any explanation.  I think you did right.”

She went back to the fireplace and sat down in the corner of the sofa, leaning far back and stretching out one foot to the fender in an unconscious attitude of perfect grace.  In the grey afternoon the firelight began to play in her auburn hair.  Now and then she glanced at Marcello with half-closed lids, and there was a suggestion of a smile on her lips.  Marcello saw that in her way she was as beautiful as Regina, and he remembered how they had kissed, without a word, when the moon’s rays quivered through the trees by the Roman shore, more than two years ago.  They had been children then.  All at once he felt a great longing to kneel down beside the sofa and throw his arms round her waist and kiss her once again; but at almost the same instant he thought of Regina, waiting for him by the window over there in Trastevere, and he felt the shame rising to his face; and he leaned back in his low chair, clasping his hands tightly over one knee, as if to keep himself from moving.

“Marcello,” Aurora began presently, but she got no further.

“Yes?” Still he did not move.

“I have something on my conscience.”  She laughed low.  “No, it is serious!” she went on, as if reproving herself.  “I have always felt that everything that has happened to you since we parted that morning by the shore has been my fault.”

“Why?” Marcello seemed surprised.

“Because I called you a baby,” she said.  “If you had not been angry at that, if you had not turned away and left me suddenly—­you were quite right, you know—­you would not have been knocked down, you would not have wandered away and lost yourself.  You would not have lost your memory, or been ill in a strange place, or—­or all the rest!  So it is all my fault, you see, from beginning to end.”

“How absurd!” Marcello looked at her and smiled.

“No.  I think it is true.  But you have changed very much, Marcello.  You are not a boy any longer.  You have a will of your own now; you are a man.  Do you mind my telling you that?”

“Certainly not!” He smiled again.

“I remember very well what you answered.  You said that I should not laugh at you again.  And that has come true.  You said a good many other things.  Do you remember?”

“No.  I was angry.  What did I say?  Everything that happened before I was hurt seems very far off.”