“What a memory the fellow has for little things!” He turned away as he spoke, for he did not want her to see his face.  It was suffused with pleasure.  For an apology, which would have been intolerable eighteen months ago, was gracious and agreeable now.

She would not let this pass.  “You did not think it a little thing at the time.  You told me he had assaulted you.”

“I lost my temper,” said Philip lightly.  His vanity had been appeased, and he knew it.  This tiny piece of civility had changed his mood.  “Did he really—­what exactly did he say?”

“He said he was sorry—­pleasantly, as Italians do say such things.  But he never mentioned the baby once.”

What did the baby matter when the world was suddenly right way up?  Philip smiled, and was shocked at himself for smiling, and smiled again.  For romance had come back to Italy; there were no cads in her; she was beautiful, courteous, lovable, as of old.  And Miss Abbott—­she, too, was beautiful in her way, for all her gaucheness and conventionality.  She really cared about life, and tried to live it properly.  And Harriet—­even Harriet tried.

This admirable change in Philip proceeds from nothing admirable, and may therefore provoke the gibes of the cynical.  But angels and other practical people will accept it reverently, and write it down as good.

“The view from the Rocca (small gratuity) is finest at sunset,” he murmured, more to himself than to her.

“And he never mentioned the baby once,” Miss Abbott repeated.  But she had returned to the window, and again her finger pursued the delicate curves.  He watched her in silence, and was more attracted to her than he had ever been before.  She really was the strangest mixture.

“The view from the Rocca—­wasn’t it fine?”

“What isn’t fine here?” she answered gently, and then added, “I wish I was Harriet,” throwing an extraordinary meaning into the words.

“Because Harriet—?”

She would not go further, but he believed that she had paid homage to the complexity of life.  For her, at all events, the expedition was neither easy nor jolly.  Beauty, evil, charm, vulgarity, mystery—­she also acknowledged this tangle, in spite of herself.  And her voice thrilled him when she broke silence with “Mr. Herriton—­come here—­look at this!”

She removed a pile of plates from the Gothic window, and they leant out of it.  Close opposite, wedged between mean houses, there rose up one of the great towers.  It is your tower:  you stretch a barricade between it and the hotel, and the traffic is blocked in a moment.  Farther up, where the street empties out by the church, your connections, the Merli and the Capocchi, do likewise.  They command the Piazza, you the Siena gate.  No one can move in either but he shall be instantly slain, either by bows or by crossbows, or by Greek fire.  Beware, however, of the back bedroom windows.  For they are menaced by the tower of the Aldobrandeschi, and before now arrows have stuck quivering over the washstand.  Guard these windows well, lest there be a repetition of the events of February 1338, when the hotel was surprised from the rear, and your dearest friend—­you could just make out that it was he—­was thrown at you over the stairs.