I shall skip over the rather uninteresting events of the next two or three days. Nothing of consequence happened, unless you are willing to consider important two perfectly blissful nights of sleep on my part. Also, I had the pleasure of taking the Countess "out walking" in my courtyard, to use a colloquialism: once in the warm, sweet sunshine, again 'neath the glow of a radiant moon. She had not been outside the castle walls, literally, in more than five weeks, and the colour leaped back into her cheeks with a rush that delighted me. I may mention in passing that I paid particular attention to her suggestion concerning my dilapidated, gone-to-seed garden, although I had been bored to extinction by Jasper, Jr. when he undertook to enlighten me horticulturally. She agreed to come forth every day and assist me in building the poor thing up; propping it, so to speak. As for Mrs. Titus, that really engaging lady made life so easy for me that I wondered why I had ever been apprehensive. She was quite wonderful when "it came to a pinch." I began to understand a good many things about her, chief among them being her unvoiced theories on matrimony. While she did not actually commit herself, I had no difficulty in ascertaining that, from her point of view, marriages are not made in heaven, and that a properly arranged divorce is a great deal less terrestrial than it is commonly supposed to be. She believed in matrimony as a trial and divorce as a reward, or something to that effect. My opinion seemed to carry considerable weight with her. For a day or two after our somewhat sanguinary encounter, she was prone to start--even to jump slightly--when I addressed myself to her with unintentional directness. She soon got over that, however. We were discussing Aline's unfortunate venture into the state of matrimony and I, feeling temporarily august and superior, managed to say the wrong thing and in doing so put myself in a position from which I could not recede without loss of dignity. If my memory serves me correctly I remarked, with some asperity, that marriages of that kind never turned out well for any one except the bridegroom. She looked at me coldly. "I am afraid, Mr. Smart, that you have been putting some very bad notions into my daughter's head," she said. "Bad notions?" I murmured. "She has developed certain pronounced and rather extraordinary views concerning the nobility as the result of your--ah--argument, I may say." "I'm very sorry. I know one or two exceedingly nice noblemen, and I've no doubt there are a great many more. She must have misunderstood me. I wasn't running down the nobility, Mrs. Titus. I was merely questioning the advisability of elevating it in the way we Americans sometimes do."