Mr. Meredith laughed, and Roma blushed suddenly and vividly. ‘We allow our daughters more liberty of speech and action than do your countrymen, Signor. Roma has been brought up _à l’Anglaise_; and then my daughter has the right to defend her friend.’ The Signor bowed and smiled, and Roma blushed still more vividly. She thought it bad taste on her father’s part to give so broad a hint to a perfect stranger, upon private family affairs. Signor Pagliadini seemed to divine her confusion without looking at her, and turned the conversation into new channels. He was certainly a fascinating talker. Roma listened to him with more pleasure than she had experienced for many a long day. The soft language of her childhood was like music to her ear, and she listened to the stories of her native land, and the cities in which her happy early youth had been passed, with undivided attention. Michael Meredith dozed in his chair under the influence of the low musical voice, and the Italian spoke on, talking only to Roma, looking into her fair, pale face, and delighting with all the artistic feeling within him, in her rare and perfect beauty of form and feature. When the blind man awoke to consciousness, more than an hour had passed, and yet his daughter and their guest were still in earnest converse. A stroll round the dewy garden after dinner, and some music in the drawing-room later, closed the day; and Roma went to bed that night feeling as though something very strange had happened to her, and as though some new interest had unaccountably come into her life. This Italian with the soft voice and earnest eyes, that seemed to her half-strange and half-familiar, interested her more than any man whom she had met, since her childhood’s dreams had merged into the more definite ideals of womanhood. CHAPTER X. FRIEND OR FOE? Tor left Michael Meredith’s house that day with a presentiment that this visit of Signor Pagliadini boded no good to him.