"Oh, the women!" he said, without the slightest levity. "One would not even try." He raised his eyes and, obeying a sudden impulse, added: "I think that perhaps you could understand me." "That would be because I am so much older," she said. Cosmo discovered in her delicately modelled face, with all its grace and freshness of youth, an interrogative profundity of expression, the impress of the problems of life and the conflicts of the soul. The great light of day had treated her kindly. Bathed in the sunshine entering through the four windows, she appeared to him wonderful in the glow of her complexion, in the harmony of her form and the composed nobility of her attitude. He felt this wonderfulness of her whole person in some sort physically, and thought that he had looked at her too long. He glanced aside and met the dark girl's round unwinking stare of a cat ready to fly at one. She had not moved a hair's breadth, and Cosmo felt reluctant to take his eyes off her exactly as though she had been a fierce cat. He heard the voice of the Countess of Montevesso and had to turn to her. "Well, wait a few days before you write home about . . . Genoa." "I had a mind to begin a letter yesterday," he said. "What? Already! Only a few hours after your arrival!" "Yes. Henrietta is very anxious to hear everything relating to the Emperor Napoleon." Madame de Montevesso was genuinely surprised. Her voice lost its equable charm while she asked what on earth could he have had to tell of Napoleon that he could not have written to her from Paris. "Yes. He is in everybody's thoughts and on everybody's lips there," he said. "Whenever three people come together he is the presence that is with them. But last night . . ." He was on the point of telling her of his adventure on the tower when she struck in: "The Congress will put an end to all that presently." It checked Cosmo's expansiveness and he said instead: "It's very possible. But last night on arriving here I experienced a curious sensation of his nearness. I went down in the evening to look at the Port." "He isn't certainly very far from here. And what are your feelings about him?" "Oh," he rejoined lightly, "as about everything else in the world--contradictory." Madame de Montevesso rose suddenly, saying: "I won't ask you, then, as to your feelings about myself." Cosmo stood up hastily. He was a little the taller of the two but their faces were nearly on a level. "I should like you to make up your mind about me before you take up your traveller's pen," continued Adèle. "Come again this evening. There will be a few people here; and, as you have said, when a few people come together just now Napoleon is always with them, an unseen presence. But you will see my father. Do you remember him at all?"