She strolled on to the ruins of the old villa and sat down among the crumbling arches. She was in a very different mood herself than on that other afternoon of the early spring when Paul Dessart had found her there. She thought of the little sketch he had painted, and recalled her own words as he gave it to her: ‘I will keep it to remember you and the villa by when I go home to America.’ The words had been spoken lightly, but now they sounded prophetic. Everything had seemed before her then; now all seemed behind. A few months more and she would be back in America, with possibly nothing more than the sketch to remember her life in Italy by—and it had meant so much to her; now that it was slipping away, she realized how much. She seemed to have grown more, to have felt more, than in all her life before; and she hated inexpressibly to leave it behind. Crossing to the little grotto that had formed the subject of the picture, she stood gazing pensively at the dilapidated moss-grown pile of stones. The afternoon when Paul had sketched it seemed years before; in reality it was not two months. She thought of him as he had looked that day—so enthusiastic and young and debonair—and she thought of him without a tremor. Many things had changed since then, and she had changed with them. If only Eleanor’s suspicion might be true, that he would come to care for Margaret! She clung to the suggestion. Eleanor’s ‘superstition’ need trouble her no more; Paul would not need to be avenged. She turned aside, and as she did so something caught her eyes. She leaned over to look, and then started back with an exclamation of alarm. A man was lying asleep, almost at her feet, hidden by the tall weeds that choked the entrance to the grotto. The first involuntary thought that flashed to her mind was of Gervasio’s stepfather, but immediately she knew that he was not the sleeper. Gervasio’s stepfather was old, with a grizzled beard; it was evident that this man was young, in spite of the fact that his hat was pulled across his eyes. She laughed at her own fear; it was some peasant who had come from the fields to rest in the shade. She leaned over to look again, and as she did so her heart suddenly leaped into her mouth. The man’s shirt was open at the throat, and there was a dark-purple crucifix tattooed upside down upon his breast. For a second she stood staring, powerless to move; the next, she was running wildly across the blazing wheat field toward the shelter of the villa, with a frightened glance behind at the shadow of the cypresses. CHAPTER XXIII