"I really should feel better if I could confess," she said. "It would take a whole load off my chest. You see, I don't know your ways of doing over here; that would be my way. They might all forgive me and say I was just a fool. But if they didn't, and, as you seem to fear, made Florence too unpleasant to hold me, luckily I'm not tied down. I'm free. I can pull up stakes when I please and go pitch my tent elsewhere." "The delightful independence of riches! The grandeur and detachment of your point of view!" he spoke in a flare of excited bitterness. "What you have said is equivalent to saying that your friends of Florence are a matter of complete indifference to you!" "I _love_ my friends of Florence, and you know it, Gerald Fane! And I don't believe they'd ever turn against me, no matter what trouble I'd made for myself at that confounded veglione. So I don't look to leaving Florence just yet a while. You know I was only talking. I felt perfectly safe--But it's astonishing to me, dear boy, how ready you are to get mad at me. When you know me so well, too. You ought to be ashamed." "I am, dear. It's my temper that's bad. And you're so kind," he meekly subsided. "But you _are_ trying, you know," he added, after a moment, with returning vivacity, "what with the extreme bad taste of your masked ball adventures, and your obstinate determination to publish them, and then your insane obstinacy to make a show of yourself as a colored nurse in this vaudeville--But I forgot, I had sworn to myself not to speak of that again. May I count upon you at least to leave entirely to me the matter of exculpating Antonia to General Costanzi and De Brézé?" "Oh, very well, if you think best." "Will you promise solemnly to be silent on the whole matter?" "All right. But I don't like it, Gerald. If I've done wrong, I should feel lots easier in my mind if I could tell." "That feeling of yours is precisely what I wish to guard against. Do believe that in this matter the old Florentine I am knows better than you. Promise." "All right, I promise." After a moment, "There's no chance, is there, of your changing your mind about the other matter"--he asked sheepishly,--"the matter which I must not mention? No, I supposed not. I am perfectly aware of my presumption in making any suggestion to you on the subject. But if you knew how the thought of it torments me...." "You'll get over it when you see me. You'll just laugh with the rest." "Enough. Good night," he said stiffly, but it is doubtful that the word of leave-taking was anything more than a mode of expressing displeasure, or that departure would immediately have succeeded upon his rising from his chair, had not a sound of coughing from the neighboring room called up before him an image of Harriet Estelle, wide awake, with a stern and feverish eye fixed on the clock. He was startled into a consciousness of the lateness of the hour.