During the last intermission Brewster and Peggy were walking in the foyer.  They had rarely spoken since the day of the ride, but Monty noticed with happiness that she had on several occasions avoided Pettingill.

“I thought we had given up fairyland when we left the lakes, but I believe you carry it with you,” she said.

“The trouble with this,” Monty replied, “is that there are too many people about.  My fairyland is to be just a little different.”

“Your fairyland, Monty, will be built of gold and paved with silver.  You will sit all day cutting coupons in an office of alabaster.”

“Peggy, do you too think me vulgar?  It’s a beastly parade, I know, but it can’t stop now.  You don’t realize the momentum of the thing.”

“You do it up to the handle,” she put in.  “And you are much too generous to be vulgar.  But it worries me, Monty, it worries me desperately.  It’s the future I’m thinking of—­your future, which is being swallowed up.  This kind of thing can’t go on.  And what is to follow it?  You are wasting your substance, and you are not making any life for yourself that opens out.”

“Peggy,” he answered very seriously, “you have got to trust me.  I can’t back out, but I’ll tell you this.  You shall not be disappointed in me in the end.”

There was a mist before the girl’s eyes as she looked at him.  “I believe you, Monty,” she said simply; “I shall not forget.”

The curtain rose upon the next act, and something in the opera toward the end seemed to bring the two very close together.  As they were leaving the theater, there was a note of regret from Peggy.  “It has been perfect,” she breathed, “yet, Monty, isn’t it a waste that no one else should have seen it?  Think of these poverty-stricken peasants who adore music and have never heard an opera.”

“Well, they shall hear one now.”  Monty rose to it, but he felt like a hypocrite in concealing his chief motive.  “We’ll repeat the performance to-morrow night and fill the house with them.”

He was as good as his word.  Bertier was given a task the next day which was not to his taste.  But with the assistance of the city authorities he carried it through.  To them it was an evidence of insanity, but there was something princely about it and they were tolerant.  The manager of the opera house was less complacent, and he had an exclamatory terror of the damage to his upholstery.  But Brewster had discovered that in Italy gold is a panacea for all ills, and his prescriptions were liberal.  To him the day was short, for Peggy’s interest in the penance, as it came to be called, was so keen that she insisted on having a hand in the preliminaries.  There was something about the partnership that appealed to Monty.