“If they resemble each other, then, you were simply mistaken in the mother.”

I took his arm and we walked on again; there seemed no adequate reply to such a charge.  “Your state of mind brings back my own so completely,” I said presently.  “You admire her—­you adore her, and yet, secretly, you mistrust her.  You are enchanted with her personal charm, her grace, her wit, her everything; and yet in your private heart you are afraid of her.”

“Afraid of her?”

“Your mistrust keeps rising to the surface; you can’t rid yourself of the suspicion that at the bottom of all things she is hard and cruel, and you would be immensely relieved if some one should persuade you that your suspicion is right.”

Stanmer made no direct reply to this; but before we reached the hotel he said—­“What did you ever know about the mother?”

“It’s a terrible story,” I answered.

He looked at me askance.  “What did she do?”

“Come to my rooms this evening and I will tell you.”

He declared he would, but he never came.  Exactly the way I should have acted!

14th.—­I went again, last evening, to Casa Salvi, where I found the same little circle, with the addition of a couple of ladies.  Stanmer was there, trying hard to talk to one of them, but making, I am sure, a very poor business of it.  The Countess—­well, the Countess was admirable.  She greeted me like a friend of ten years, toward whom familiarity should not have engendered a want of ceremony; she made me sit near her, and she asked me a dozen questions about my health and my occupations.

“I live in the past,” I said.  “I go into the galleries, into the old palaces and the churches.  Today I spent an hour in Michael Angelo’s chapel at San Loreozo.”

“Ah yes, that’s the past,” said the Countess.  “Those things are very old.”

“Twenty-seven years old,” I answered.

“Twenty-seven? Altro!”

“I mean my own past,” I said.  “I went to a great many of those places with your mother.”

“Ah, the pictures are beautiful,” murmured the Countess, glancing at Stanmer.

“Have you lately looked at any of them?” I asked.  “Have you gone to the galleries with him?”

She hesitated a moment, smiling.  “It seems to me that your question is a little impertinent.  But I think you are like that.”

“A little impertinent?  Never.  As I say, your mother did me the honour, more than once, to accompany me to the Uffizzi.”

“My mother must have been very kind to you.”

“So it seemed to me at the time.”

“At the time only?”

“Well, if you prefer, so it seems to me now.”

“Eh,” said the Countess, “she made sacrifices.”

“To what, cara Signora?  She was perfectly free.  Your lamented father was dead—­and she had not yet contracted her second marriage.”