Certainly Susy looked lovely enough to justify the most irrational pangs. As a girl she had been, for some people’s taste, a trifle fine-drawn and sharp-edged; now, to her old lightness of line was added a shadowy bloom, a sort of star-reflecting depth. Her movements were slower, less angular; her mouth had a needing droop, her lids seemed weighed down by their lashes; and then suddenly the old spirit would reveal itself through the new languor, like the tartness at the core of a sweet fruit. As her husband looked at her across the flowers and lights he laughed inwardly at the nothingness of all things else. Vanderlyn and Clarissa left betimes the next morning; and Mrs. Vanderlyn, who was to start for St. Moritz in the afternoon, devoted her last hours to anxious conferences with her maid and Susy. Strefford, with Fred Gillow and the others, had gone for a swim at the Lido, and Lansing seized the opportunity to get back to his book. The quietness of the great echoing place gave him a foretaste of the solitude to come. By mid-August all their party would be scattered: the Hickses off on a cruise to Crete and the AEgean, Fred Gillow on the way to his moor, Strefford to stay with friends in Capri till his annual visit to Northumberland in September. One by one the others would follow, and Lansing and Susy be left alone in the great sun-proof palace, alone under the star-laden skies, alone with the great orange moons--still theirs!--above the bell-tower of San Giorgio. The novel, in that blessed quiet, would unfold itself as harmoniously as his dreams. He wrote on, forgetful of the passing hours, till the door opened and he heard a step behind him. The next moment two hands were clasped over his eyes, and the air was full of Mrs. Vanderlyn’s last new scent. “You dear thing--I’m just off, you know,” she said. “Susy told me you were working, and I forbade her to call you down. She and Streffy are waiting to take me to the station, and I’ve run up to say good-bye.” “Ellie, dear!” Full of compunction, Lansing pushed aside his writing and started up; but she pressed him back into his seat. “No, no! I should never forgive myself if I’d interrupted you. I oughtn’t to have come up; Susy didn’t want me to. But I had to tell you, you dear.... I had to thank you...” In her dark travelling dress and hat, so discreetly conspicuous, so negligent and so studied, with a veil masking her paint, and gloves hiding her rings, she looked younger, simpler, more natural than he had ever seen her. Poor Ellie such a good fellow, after all! “To thank me? For what? For being so happy here?” he laughed, taking her hands. She looked at him, laughed back, and flung her arms about his neck. “For helping me to be so happy elsewhere--you and Susy, you two blessed darlings!” she cried, with a kiss on his cheek. Their eyes met for a second; then her arms slipped slowly downward, dropping to her sides. Lansing sat before her like a stone.