“You laugh?” stammered Lilia.

“Ah!” he cried, “who could help it?  I, who thought you knew and saw nothing—­I am tricked—­I am conquered.  I give in.  Let us talk of it no more.”

He touched her on the shoulder like a good comrade, half amused and half penitent, and then, murmuring and smiling to himself, ran quietly out of the room.

Perfetta burst into congratulations.  “What courage you have!” she cried; “and what good fortune!  He is angry no longer!  He has forgiven you!”

Neither Perfetta, nor Gino, nor Lilia herself knew the true reason of all the misery that followed.  To the end he thought that kindness and a little attention would be enough to set things straight.  His wife was a very ordinary woman, and why should her ideas differ from his own?  No one realized that more than personalities were engaged; that the struggle was national; that generations of ancestors, good, bad, or indifferent, forbad the Latin man to be chivalrous to the northern woman, the northern woman to forgive the Latin man.  All this might have been foreseen:  Mrs. Herriton foresaw it from the first.

Meanwhile Lilia prided herself on her high personal standard, and Gino simply wondered why she did not come round.  He hated discomfort and yearned for sympathy, but shrank from mentioning his difficulties in the town in case they were put down to his own incompetence.  Spiridione was told, and replied in a philosophical but not very helpful letter.  His other great friend, whom he trusted more, was still serving in Eritrea or some other desolate outpost.  And, besides, what was the good of letters?  Friends cannot travel through the post.

Lilia, so similar to her husband in many ways, yearned for comfort and sympathy too.  The night he laughed at her she wildly took up paper and pen and wrote page after page, analysing his character, enumerating his iniquities, reporting whole conversations, tracing all the causes and the growth of her misery.  She was beside herself with passion, and though she could hardly think or see, she suddenly attained to magnificence and pathos which a practised stylist might have envied.  It was written like a diary, and not till its conclusion did she realize for whom it was meant.

“Irma, darling Irma, this letter is for you.  I almost forgot I have a daughter.  It will make you unhappy, but I want you to know everything, and you cannot learn things too soon.  God bless you, my dearest, and save you.  God bless your miserable mother.”

Fortunately Mrs. Herriton was in when the letter arrived.  She seized it and opened it in her bedroom.  Another moment, and Irma’s placid childhood would have been destroyed for ever.

Lilia received a brief note from Harriet, again forbidding direct communication between mother and daughter, and concluding with formal condolences.  It nearly drove her mad.

“Gently! gently!” said her husband.  They were sitting together on the loggia when the letter arrived.  He often sat with her now, watching her for hours, puzzled and anxious, but not contrite.