"I know, dear, I know, and it has been my fault if I have lost sight of you through all these years. I realized that in Rome. When I had tried to find some trace of you there, and failed, I wrote to your Aunt. After all that had happened there, Rome was intolerable to me,--you can understand that--and I came here to await an answer." "Aunt Gitta is dead," said Ragna. Oh how much there was to say, how much that he must know, before she allowed him to go further! And the things he said, or rather implied--his unchanging devotion, his happiness at finding her, were so perilously sweet to hear. In his presence she felt herself transported to another atmosphere, poles apart from the one she had just left. It transformed her, she felt a different creature already. Still the past must be dealt with; she gathered herself together for the effort of telling him, but as her lips parted, two English ladies entered the drawing-room, followed by a waiter with a tea-tray. They installed themselves at a small table near a window, casting curious glances the while, at the two standing in the middle of the room,--for both Ragna and Angelescu had been too absorbed in one another to remember the small conventionalities of life. "What a bore!" said Angelescu impatiently--"and the worst of it is that there is no place in this hotel where we can be by ourselves. What shall we do, Ragna? We must be alone somewhere--is there any place we can drive to?" "Yes," said Ragna eagerly, guiltily glad of the short reprieve. "Let us drive out into the country, we shall be alone there." She seated herself while Angelescu went for his hat and tried to collect her ideas, to marshal the facts that must be told. It seemed so cruel that the beauty of their meeting should be dimmed if not destroyed by reason of the very cause that had brought that meeting about. What would he do, what would he say, when he knew? Would it change him? A cold fear gripped her heart, but through it, she felt the happy bound and surge of her pulses at the recollection of the tender expression of his eyes, the radiance of his dear bronzed manly face. "I must have loved him even then," she marvelled to herself, thinking of their former meetings, for she knew now that she loved him and it seemed to her that it had been so always, ever since she could remember. When she had seen his name in the paper, how spontaneous had been her impulse towards him, how unhesitating the instinct to fly to him for refuge! "Only, why did I not realize it before?" she asked herself. Angelescu returned, hat in hand and they walked down the wide staircase and out the door, held open by an attentive flunkey. "Where shall we go?" asked Angelescu as he beckoned to a cab on the rank. "To Sta. Margherita a Montici," said Ragna to the driver as she took her seat.