Rosalys divine that I loved her, how I loved her, and make me a sign, and so enable me to speak? Presently—and all too soon—she would return to the carriage, and drive away with Aunt Elizabeth; and I, in the lugubrious twilight, would descend the great marble Spanish staircase (a perilous path, amongst models and beggars and other things) to the Piazza, and seek out Jack Everett at the Caffé Greco. Thence he and I would go off to dine together somewhere, condoling with each other upon our ill-starred passions. After dinner, pulling our hats over our eyes, two desperately tragic forms, we would set ourselves upon the traces of d’.vignac and Kônig and Father Flynn, determined to forget our sorrows in an evening of dissipation, saying regretfully, “These are the evil courses to which the love of woman has reduced us—a couple of the best-meaning fellows in Christendom, and surely born for better ends.” When we were children (hasn’t Kenneth Grahame written it for us in a golden book?) we played at conspirators and pirates. When we were a little older, and Byron or Musset had superseded Fenimore Cooper, some of us found there was an unique excitement to be got from the game of Blighted Beings. Oh, why couldn’t I tell her? Why couldn’t she divine it, and make me an encouraging sign? But, of course, in the end I did tell her. It was on the night of my birthday. I had dined at the Palazzo Zacchinelli, and with the dessert a great cake was brought in and set before me. A number of little red candles were burning round it, and embossed upon it in frosting was this device: A birthday-piece From Rosalys, Wishing birthdays more in plenty To her cousin “nearly twenty.” And counting the candles, I perceived they were nineteen. Probably my joy was somewhat tempered by confusion, to think that my little equivocation on the subject of my age had been discovered. As I looked up from the cake to its giver, I met a pair of eyes that were gleaming with mischievous raillery; and she shook her head at me, and murmured, “Oh, you fibber!” “How on earth did you find out?” I wondered. “Oh—a little bird,” laughed she. “I don’t think it’s at all respectful of you to call Aunt Elizabeth a little bird,” said I. After dinner we went out upon the terrace. It was a warm night, and there was a moon. A moonlit night in Italy—dark velvet shot with silver. And the air was intoxicant with the scent of hyacinths. We were in March; the garden had become a wilderness of spring flowers, narcissuses and jonquils, crocuses, anemones, tulips, and hyacinths; hyacinths, everywhere hyacinths. Rosalys had thrown a bit of white lace over her hair. Oh, I assure you, in the moonlight, with the white lace over her hair, with her pale face, and her eyes, her shining, mysterious eyes—oh, I promise you, she was lovely.