"You poor Marchese!"--she said--"Still you think of love! I really believe Italians keep all the sentiment of le moyen age in their hearts,--other peoples are gradually letting it go. You are like a child believing in childish things! You imagine I could be happy with a lover--or several lovers! To moon all day and embrace all night! Oh fie! What a waste of time! And in the end nothing is so fatiguing!" She broke off a spray of flowering laurel and hit him with it playfully on the hand. "Don't moon or spoon, caro amico! What is it all about? Do I leave you nothing on which to write poetry? I find you out in Sicily--a delightful poor nobleman with a family history going back to the Caesars!--handsome, clever, with beautiful ideas--and I choose and commission you to restore and rebuild for me a fairy palace out of a half-ruined ancient one, because you have taste and skill, and I know you can do everything when money is no object--and you have done, and are doing it all perfectly. Why then spoil it by falling in love with me? Fie, fie!" She laughed again and rising, gave him her hand. "Hold that!" she said--"And while you hold it, tell me of my other palace--the one with wings!" He clasped her small white fingers in his own sun-browned palm and walked beside her bare-headed. "Ah!" And he drew a deep breath--"That is a miracle! What we called your 'impossible' plan has been made possible! But who would have thought that a woman--" "Stop there!" she interrupted--"Do not repeat the old gander-cackle of barbaric man, who, while owing his every comfort as well as the continuance of his race, to woman, denied her every intellectual initiative! 'Who would have thought that a woman'--could do anything but bend low before a man with grovelling humility saying 'My lord, here am I, the waiting vessel of your lordship's pleasure!--possess me or I die!' We have changed that beggarly attitude!" Her eyes flashed,--her voice rang out--the little fingers he held, stiffened resolutely in his clasp. He looked at her with a touch of anxiety. "Pardon me!--I did not mean--" he stammered. In a second her mood changed, and she laughed. "No!--Of course you 'did not mean' anything, Marchese! You are naturally surprised that my 'idea' which was little more than an idea, has resolved itself into a scientific fact--but you would have been just as surprised if the conception had been that of a man instead of a woman. Only you would not have said so!" She laughed again,--a laugh of real enjoyment,--then went on-- "Now tell me--what of my White Eagle?--what movement?--what speed?"