"Oh, carefully!" said Esmé, shutting the door, going out on to the old marble terrace. "Carefully. One never knows what these people understand. You must not take the letters." "I had to, Esmé. He's caught some boat. He will be in London at once. He--Cyril! He will hear--see the papers. We must leave at once, to-morrow. I am wiring to Paris, and to the nurse in London. Wiring for rooms. Ah! the doctor, prying at us." But little Luigi was not prying. He came to advise, to counsel caution for the fair English miladi. She must not run about so much. "There was a strain," he said. "Madame was not well--no, not well at all." His dark eyes looked at Esmé's drawn face; he grunted thoughtfully. "Madame is not so strong," he said. "It is but three weeks--but three, and she is up and about." "And we leave to-morrow," she said. "My husband is coming home, signor. I must fly to meet him." "He could come here," said Luigi Frascatelle. "You are not fit to travel." "He hates Italy. This was my fancy--this coming here." Her fancy! The big, bare rooms had made Esmé nervous and irritable; she had chafed during the dullness of waiting; had grown fretful and afraid. She hated the big room she had lain sick in, with its ornate bed, its bare, polished boards; the fire of chestnut wood. How often she had woken in terror, dreading what must come to her in it. Then there was constant need of caution; the strain of remembering had told on the woman who ought to have been with her own people, with her hours full, her time taken up. She could have played bridge, grumbled to her friends, learnt comfort, been with her husband. "No, Madame is nervous; not well," said the little Italian, "run down. Better if Sir Blakeney came here to take Madame the journey. Madame does not know that there were difficulties which have weakened her." Esmé went away irritably. Denise, laughing, excited, came in. "She will be all right," she said impatiently. "It is nothing, surely, mere natural strain." "Che lo sa?" said Frascatelle, half to himself. "There is a nervousness, Madame, as if from mental strain--and there were complications at the birth." "It's this Italy," Denise said carelessly, "so depressing." "But I thought," Luigi looked up in astonishment, "that Italy was Miladi's whim--" "But of course," Denise flushed, "but whims, signor, are not always wise. The place was lonely." When Luigi Frascatelle came next day to the villa it was empty. The Italian men and maids had been paid off liberally. Beatrice, weeping for her charge, had come in the motor to the station and seen the ladies off. They were both thickly veiled, both muffled up. The little doctor drove back to the town and on to the station, to meet the old woman returning from the station. "From here to Paris, without maids, without a nurse," he cried, "and with a baby of four weeks. They are strange, these English." "They who know not how to feed it," groaned Beatrice. "All is not right, signor."