Scrap watched her, interested in spite of herself, because it seemed so extraordinary to be as happy as all that on so little.  San Salvatore was beautiful, and the weather was divine; but scenery and weather had never been enough for Scrap, and how could they be enough for somebody who would have to leave them quite soon and go back to life in Hampstead?  Also, there was the imminence of Mellersh, of that Mellersh from whom Lotty had so lately run.  It was all very well to feel one ought to share, and to make a beau geste and do it, but the beaux gestes Scrap had known hadn’t made anybody happy.  Nobody really liked being the object of one, and it always meant an effort on the part of the maker.  Still, she had to admit there was no effort about Lotty; it was quite plain that everything she did and said was effortless, and that she was just simply, completely happy.

And so Mrs. Wilkins was; for her doubts as to whether she had had time to become steady enough in serenity to go on being serene in Mellersh’s company when she had it uninterruptedly right round the clock, had gone by the middle of the week, and she felt that nothing now could shake her.  She was ready for anything.  She was firmly grafted, rooted, built into heaven.  Whatever Mellersh said or did, she would not budge an inch out of heaven, would not rouse herself a single instant to come outside it and be cross.  On the contrary, she was going to pull him up into it beside her, and they would sit comfortably together, suffused in light, and laugh at how much afraid of him she used to be in Hampstead, and at how deceitful her afraidness had made her.  But he wouldn’t need much pulling.  He would come in quite naturally after a day or two, irresistibly wafted on the scented breezes of that divine air; and there he would sit arrayed in stars, thought Mrs. Wilkins, in whose mind, among much other debris, floated occasional bright shreds of poetry.  She laughed to herself a little at the picture of Mellersh, that top-hatted, black-coated, respectable family solicitor, arrayed in stars, but she laughed affectionately, almost with a maternal pride in how splendid he would look in such fine clothes.  “Poor lamb,” she murmured to herself affectionately.  And added, “What he wants is a thorough airing.”

This was during the first half of the week.  By the beginning of the last half, at the end of which Mr. Wilkins arrived, she left off even assuring herself that she was unshakeable, that she was permeated beyond altering by the atmosphere, she no longer thought of it or noticed it; she took it for granted.  If one may say so, and she certainly said so, not only to herself but also to Lady Caroline, she had found her celestial legs.