"My dear, how beautiful you are! I love to look at you! If I were the typical old lady I'd be telling what a beauty I was myself in my palmy days. I don't seem to know my cues at all. But as a matter of fact, I'm a better looking ruin than I ever was girl! If I were more wily, too, and less wise, I probably wouldn't urge you quite so heartily, to marry my only son. For there is danger in your beauty, child. But years have taught me to appreciate danger. And I couldn't be so unkind as to deprive a son of mine of such a precious stimulant." With an enigmatic smile she raised herself on tiptoe and pecked daintily at Anne's chin. The younger woman gathered her impulsively into her arms and squeezed her. "You delicious old cynic! No wonder Vittorio adores you. I do myself!" A wistful expression crossed the delicate old face. "Be good to us, my dear," she whispered. "We need you terribly in our house." She turned gayly-shawled shoulders, and trotted up the long avenue towards her villa. Anne gazed after the small figure affectionately. Her absent eyes swept the familiar gardens whose famous boxwood hedges defined the paths with fantastic precision. Here a strange, antediluvian beast, there a gigantic globe, so that to the bird's-eye view the gardens appeared like an enormous chessboard with pawns at play. In the distance, from behind a mass of towering cypresses, gleamed the villa, its splendid façade flanked by a long flight of marble steps. Anne closed the gate and walked back through her own simple garden. She was anxious to reach the terrace again before all vestige of the sunset should have disappeared, and she mounted the steps with rapid feet. A cape over her shoulders, she drew a chair up by the balustrade and sat there while the henna-colored hills darkened to purple, then faded into lavender, and a mist rolled up from the valley and curled about the city like a smoking halo. Pretty soon a few lights gradually emerged with the evanescent gleam of a flock of fireflies. Fireflies! Anne's lips curled downward. She closed her eyes behind smarting tears. Soon would return the season of fireflies and roses. Would Vittorio be there to wander arm in arm as of old in the Viale, beneath a golden moon, while swarms of fireflies danced about them and the scent of roses and verbena ascended to the stars? Anne did not know. She had not been able to bring herself to the point of meeting him again, although she had written of her definite rupture with Alexis only a few weeks after it had taken place. But her heart was still sore from the uprooting, and the necessity for solitude was urgent as the primitive instinct of a wounded animal. So she had begged Vittorio to be patient a little while longer, to give her time to readjust herself to the old life. And he had been generous as usual, with an ecstatic undercurrent coursing beneath the sacrifice; a feeling as of crisis reached and nearly overcome; a premonition of future joys.