"Well, that's thrown in!" McTaggart laughed--"Won't she make a pretty one! I think she'll just love Siena--and Rome too--it's a ripping place! You'll have to come and stay with us. Oh, I forgot--about Roddy." He went on with his plans for the latter, his handsome face alight with pleasure. Miss Uniacke guessed in every word the depths of his love for the boy's sister. "It's like a fairy tale!" she said. "It is a fairy tale----" his voice was lowered now with a touch of awe. "All true love is that, I think. It's outside this work-a-day world. Something too fine to be measured--like a beautiful vision seen in a dream..." He glanced up shyly at his listener and in her worn and serious face caught a look of longing, oddly pathetic, but full of genuine sympathy. For a moment their thoughtful eyes met--the old, saddened ones, knowing life, and those of youth, bright with hope: met and wondered, across the gulf. Then McTaggart broke the silence. "I don't want Jill to know yet. About my inheritance, I mean. I want it to come as a huge surprise!--on our arrival in Siena. She knows I've got some property there--I fancy she thinks it's just a farm!--but I've always kept it rather dark from everybody. It's like this----" he fidgeted, under the gaze of her shrewd grey eyes, hunting for words. "Although my mother was Italian I've always _felt_ an Englishman. Really, deep down in myself, I'd sooner be English, any day. But, on the other hand, you see, I admit a certain responsibility. My mother was treated abominably"--a hard look came into his face--"just because she married my father! They practically cut her adrift. "Now, by an odd stroke of luck, I have come into all that my mother lost. And I feel it's up to me to show that she was right, after all. She married for love, and so shall I. An English wife ... my little Jill! But we'll have to live in Italy half the year--be Maramonte as well as McTaggart--not for ourselves but because I believe that _she_ would have wished it." His eyes had a curious far away look. Then he seemed to come back to the present. "All the same I've felt, somehow, that a foreign title, over here, wouldn't do--rather snobbish..." He laughed with a shade of nervousness. "Quite right." Miss Uniacke nodded. She liked the man more and more. But, despite her careless attitude toward the secret he shared with her, her old heart warmed at the thought of this splendid match for the girl she loved. "You won't tell her? You'll keep it dark!" "Of course--it's your affair, not mine." She smiled the harshness out of the words. "All the same," she went on, "I think you ought to tell her mother. I don't approve of Mary myself--I think her conduct to her children simply shocking----" she frowned again--"the secrecy--and this sudden marriage! Still, she brought Jill into the world--it's _her_ daughter, not mine. It's paying her back in her own coin ... but I _know_ I ought to stop this folly!"