“Do not be so nervous,” her companion said gently.  “I always calculate the chances before I suggest another person’s risking anything for me.  They are a million to one that anyone could recognize you in that veil and that cloak; believe me, although I am not of your country, I am at least a gentleman, and would not have persuaded you to come if there had been any danger of complications for you.”

Stella clasped her hands convulsively—­and he drew a little nearer her.

“Do put all agitating ideas out of your mind,” he said, his blue eyes, with their benign expression, seeking hers and compelling them at last to look at him.  “Do you understand that it is foolish to spoil what we have by useless tremors.  You are here with me—­ for the next hour—­shall we not try to be happy?”

“Yes,” murmured Miss Rawson, and allowed herself to be magnetized into calmness.

“When we have passed the Piazza del Popolo and the entrance to the Pincio, I will have the car opened; then we can see all the charming young green, and I will tell you of what these gardens were long ago, and you shall see them with new eyes.”

Stella, by some sort of magic, seemed to have recovered her self-possession as his eyes looked into hers, and she chatted to him naturally, and the next half hour passed like some fairy tale.  His deep, quiet voice took her into realms of fancy that her imagination had never even dreamed about.  His cultivation was immense, and the Rome of the Caesars appeared to be as familiar to him as that of 1911.

The great beauty of the Borghese Gardens was at its height at the end of the day, the nightingales throbbed from the bushes, and the air was full of the fresh, exquisite scents of the late spring, as the day grew toward evening and all nature seemed full of beauty and peace.  It can easily be imagined what this drive meant, then, to a fine, sensitive young woman, whose every instinct of youth and freedom and life had been crushed into undeveloped nothingness by years of gray convention in an old-fashioned English cathedral town.

Stella Rawson forgot that she and this Russian were strangers, and she talked to him unrestrainedly, showing glimpses of her inner self that she had not known she possessed.  It was certainly heaven, she thought, this drive, and worth all the Aunt Caroline’s frowns.

Count Roumovski never said a word of love to her:  he treated her with perfect courtesy and infinite respect, but when at last they were turning back again, he permitted himself once more to gaze deeply into her eyes, and Stella knew for the first time in her existence that some silences are more dangerous than words.

“You do not care at all now for the good clergy-man you are affianced to,” he said.  “No—­do not be angry-I am not asking a question, I am stating a fact—­when lives have been hedged and controlled and retenu like yours has been, even the feelings lose character, and you cannot be sure of them—­but the day is approaching when you will see clearly and—­feel much.”