“My friend, why do you say this to me?  I am frank.”

“What do you call frank?  You know that a woman is obliged to lie.”

She hesitated.  Then she said: 

“A woman is frank when she does not lie uselessly.”

CHAPTER XXI

“I never have loved any one but you!”

Therese was dressed in sombre gray.  The bushes on the border of the terrace were covered with silver stars and on the hillsides the laurel-trees threw their odoriferous flame.  The cup of Florence was in bloom.

Vivian Bell walked, arrayed in white, in the fragrant garden.

“You see, darling, Florence is truly the city of flowers, and it is not inappropriate that she should have a red lily for her emblem.  It is a festival to-day, darling.”

“A festival, to-day?”

“Darling, do you not know this is the first day of May?  You did not wake this morning in a charming fairy spectacle?  Do you not celebrate the Festival of Flowers?  Do you not feel joyful, you who love flowers?  For you love them, my love, I know it:  you are very good to them.  You said to me that they feel joy and pain; that they suffer as we do.”

“Ah!  I said that they suffer as we do?”

“Yes, you said it.  It is their festival to-day.  We must celebrate it with the rites consecrated by old painters.”

Therese heard without understanding.  She was crumpling under her glove a letter which she had just received, bearing the Italian postage-stamp, and containing only these two lines: 

“I am staying at the Great Britain Hotel, Lungarno Acciaoli.  I shall expect you to-morrow morning.  No. 18.”

“Darling, do you not know it is the custom of Florence to celebrate spring on the first day of May every year?  Then you did not understand the meaning of Botticelli’s picture consecrated to the Festival of Flowers.  Formerly, darling, on the first day of May the entire city gave itself up to joy.  Young girls, crowned with sweetbrier and other flowers, made a long cortege through the Corso, under arches, and sang choruses on the new grass.  We shall do as they did.  We shall dance in the garden.”

“Ah, we shall dance in the garden?”

“Yes, darling; and I will teach you Tuscan steps of the fifteenth century which have been found in a manuscript by Mr. Morrison, the oldest librarian in London.  Come back soon, my love; we shall put on flower hats and dance.”

“Yes, dear, we shall dance,” said Therese.

And opening the gate, she ran through the little pathway that hid its stones under rose-bushes.  She threw herself into the first carriage she found.  The coachman wore forget-me-nots on his hat and on the handle of his whip: 

“Great Britain Hotel, Lungarno Acciaoli.”