The days went by, and it seemed as if, after all, she might win a few friends in the household. Ralph Allen and Alexie, his pretty fiancée, were kind to her, and soon she found that Emmett Harlow was often at her side, his clear blue eyes expressing a very decided admiration for the handsome stranger. He had a kind heart, and he tried to make up to her for the coldness of the others. “You must not mind Alys,” he said. “She is jealous of every pretty face that comes under the eyes of Francis Murray, and as for her aunt, she is spiteful because there is a man she likes very much, and she is afraid he will fall in love with you when he comes here next week.” “He is coming here, then?” she asked, without much interest in the subject, so dull are we when Fate knocks at our doors. “Oh, yes, he is a particular friend of the Murrays, and a member of our yacht-club--a Bostonian when he is at home, but something of a rover and Bohemian in his tastes. Mrs. Dunn has been in love with him for years, and I do believe he has promised to marry her, only the marrying never comes off, nobody just knows why. Maybe he don’t like it the way she throws herself at his head. Well, you’ll see them together next week, and can judge for yourself. But don’t permit him to make love to you, or she is quite capable of scratching your black eyes out.” “I shall not enter the lists for her lover’s smiles,” Italy answered coldly, and she felt so little interested that she did not even ask his name. What did she care for the men or women here, save only to find out that for which she had come--the secret, silent purpose that swayed her in remaining the unwelcome guest at The Lodge. “I have been here a week. It seems like months, but I am no nearer the clue I came to seek,” she sighed. “Oh, that I could find my father’s missing diary--the gold-clasped book--whose contents he guarded so jealously even from my mother’s eyes! She believed that its contents might throw some possible light upon the mystery of his death. What became of that volume? Did my father hide it away before he died, or did the murderer destroy it? My father always kept it in that very desk before which I found Francis Murray sitting the day I came here first--the very desk, the very library where my parent met his tragic death, and which I am tacitly forbidden to enter. Oh, how can that man bear to sit there day by day among his books? I hate him, oh, I hate him!” and she burst into tears. It chafed her almost to fury, the cold indifference of this man. She repaid it in kind by silent scorn, but beneath it all her heart burned like fire, yearned to punish him, to prove him guilty of that which she suspected. She did not know that Francis Murray watched her always with a painful interest, and that he had told Mrs. Murray one day that he was glad Italy resembled her father more than her mother. Mrs. Murray had agreed with him, and added: