“Oh, no,” said the Duchessa, “I think she was fair game. One can carry delicacy too far. He was entitled to the benefits of his discovery--for, after all, it was a discovery, was n't it? You have said yourself how indispensable the eye of the beholder is--'the seeing eye.' I think, indeed, the whole affair speaks extremely well for Mr. Wildmay. It is not every man who would be capable of so purely intellectual a passion. I suppose one must call his feeling for her a passion? It indicates a distinction in his nature. He can hardly be a mere materialist. But--but I think it's heart-rending that he never met her.” “Oh, but that's the continuation of the story,” said Peter. “He did meet her in the end, you know.” “He did meet her!” cried the Duchessa, starting up, with a sudden access of interest, whilst her eyes lightened. “He did meet her? Oh, you must tell me about that.” And just at this crisis the Cardinal and Emilia appeared, climbing the terrace steps. “Bother!” exclaimed the Duchessa, under her breath. Then, to Peter, “It will have to be for another time--unless I die of the suspense.” After the necessary greetings were transacted, another elderly priest joined the company; a tall, burly, rather florid man, mentioned, when Peter was introduced to him, as Monsignor Langshawe. “This really is her chaplain,” Peter concluded. Then a servant brought tea. “Ah, Diamond, Diamond, you little know what mischief you might have wrought,” he admonished himself, as he walked home through the level sunshine. “In another instant, if we'd not been interrupted, you would have let the cat out of the bag. The premature escape of the cat from the bag would spoil everything.” And he hugged himself, as one snatched from peril, in a qualm of retroactive terror. At the same time he was filled with a kind of exultancy. All that he had hoped had come to pass, and more, vastly more. Not only had he been received as a friend at Ventirose, but he had been encouraged to tell her a part at least of the story by which her life and his were so curiously connected; and he had been snatched from the peril of telling her too much. The day was not yet when he could safely say, “Mutato nomine.....” Would the day ever be? But, meanwhile, just to have told her the first ten lines of that story, he could not help feeling, somehow advanced matters tremendously, somehow put a new face on matters. “The hour for which the ages sighed may not be so far away as you think,” he said to Marietta. “The curtain has risen upon Act Three. I fancy I can perceive faint glimmerings of the beginning of the end.” XIX