She smiled into his eyes, and his heart fluttered.  “I must be cautious,” he told himself.  “In more ways than one, this is a crucial moment.”  At the same time, as a very part of his caution, he must appear entirely nonchalant and candid.

“Oh, no—­tutt’ altro,” he said, with an assumption of nonchalant airiness and candid promptness.  “She ’better bettered’ his expectations—­she surpassed his fondest.  She was a thousand times more delightful than he had dreamed—­though, as you know, he had dreamed a good deal.  Pauline de Fleuvieres turned out to be the feeblest, faintest echo of her.”

The Duchessa meditated for an instant.

“It seems impossible.  It’s one of those situations in which a disenchantment seems the foregone conclusion,” she said, at last.

“It seems so, indeed,” assented Peter; “but disenchantment, there was none.  She was all that he had imagined, and infinitely more.  She was the substance—­he had imagined the shadow.  He had divined her, as it were, from a single angle, and there were many angles.  Pauline was the pale reflection of one side of her—­a pencil-sketch in profile.”

The Duchessa shook her head, marvelling, and smiled again.

“You pile wonder upon wonder,” she said.  “That the reality should excel the poet’s ideal!  That the cloud-capped towers which looked splendid from afar, with all the glamour of distance, should prove to be more splendid still, on close inspection!  It’s dead against the accepted theory of things.  And that any woman should be nicer than that adorable Pauline!  You tax belief.  But I want to know what happened.  Had she read his book?”

“Nothing happened,” said Peter.  “I warned you that it was a drama without action.  A good deal happened, no doubt, in Wildmay’s secret soul.  But externally, nothing.  They simply chatted together—­exchanged the time o’ day—­like any pair of acquaintances.  No, I don’t think she had read his book.  She did read it afterwards, though.”

“And liked it?”

“Yes—­she said she liked it.”

“Well—?  But then-?” the Duchessa pressed him, insistently.  “When she discovered the part she had had in its composition—?  Was n’t she overwhelmed?  Wasn’t she immensely interested —­surprised—­moved?”

She leaned forward a little.  Her eyes were shining.  Her lips were slightly parted, so that between their warm rosiness Peter could see the exquisite white line of her teeth.  His heart fluttered again.  “I must be cautious, cautious,” he remembered, and made a strenuous “act of will” to steady himself.

“Oh, she never discovered that,” he said.

“What!” exclaimed the Duchessa.  Her face fell.  Her eyes darkened—­with dismay, with incomprehension.  “Do you—­you don’t—­mean to say that he didn’t tell her?” There was reluctance to believe, there was a conditional implication of deep reproach, in her voice.