‘How would it be if we declared an amnesty,’ he inquired—‘at least until Gervasio is fairly started in his career?’ She glanced up in his face a second, surprised, and then shook her head with an air of scepticism. ‘We can try,’ she smiled, ‘but I am afraid we were meant to be enemies.’ Her room was flooded with moonlight; she undressed without lighting her candle, and slipping on a light woollen kimono, sat down on a cushion beside the open window. She was too excited and restless to sleep. She leaned her chin on her hand, with her elbow resting on the low window-sill, and let the cool breeze fan her face. After a time she heard some one strike a match on the loggia, and her uncle and Sybert came out to the terrace and paced back and forth, talking in low tones. She could hear the rise and fall of their voices, and every now and then the breeze wafted in the smell of their cigars. She grew wider and wider awake, and followed them with her eyes as they passed and repassed in their tireless tramp. At the end of the terrace their voices sank to a low murmur, and then by the loggia they rose again until she could hear broken sentences. Sybert’s voice sounded angry, excited, almost fierce, she thought; her uncle’s, low, decisive, half contemptuous. Once, as they passed under the window, she heard her uncle say sharply: ‘Don’t be a fool, Sybert. It will make a nasty story if it gets out—and nothing’s gained.’ She did not hear Sybert’s reply, but she saw his angry gesture as he flung away the end of his cigar. The men paused by the farther end of the terrace and stood for several minutes arguing in lowered tones. Then, to Marcia’s amazement, Sybert leaped the low parapet by the ilex grove and struck out across the fields, while her uncle came back across the terrace alone, entered the house, and closed the door. She sat up straight with a quickly beating heart. What was the matter? Could they have quarrelled? Was Sybert going to the station? Surely he would not walk. She leaned out of the window and looked after him, a black speck in the moonlit wheat-field. No, he was going toward Castel Vivalanti. Why Castel Vivalanti at this time of the night? Had it anything to do with Gervasio?—or perhaps Tarquinio, the baker’s son? She recalled her uncle’s words: ‘Don’t be a fool. It will make a nasty story if it gets out.’ Perhaps people’s suspicions against him were true, after all. She thought of his look that night in the train. What was behind it? And then she thought of the picture of him in the carriage with the little boy in his arms. A man who was so kind to children could not be bad at heart. And yet, if he were all that her uncle had thought him, why did he have so many enemies—and so many doubtful friends?