“I met her in a villa above Ravello. Some charming French people--or, at least, Monsieur was French, though Madame and the money were American--were keeping guard over her. The American wife had known her somewhere, and was being good to her in her great misfortune. I won’t go into explanations of how I came to frequent their villa. They were among the scores of people I had met and known in this or that pleasant, casual way. I used to go up and dine with them; I prolonged the Italian interlude in my _wanderjahr_, more or less for the sake of doing so. I had notions of going on to Egypt, but there was time enough for that. I stayed on even more because I liked the villa--an old Saracen stronghold on the edge of the Mediterranean, modernized into comfort--than because I liked them, though they were pleasant enough. “At first I wished the girl were not there. She never talked; she was just a stiff figure, swathed in black up to her throat, sitting day by day almost motionless on a parapet. She was a harsh note. Wherever you were, she was in the middle distance, a black figure looking out to sea. It didn’t take many days for her to get on my nerves. She was like a portent. I fancy she got on theirs, too, but they were helpless. I gathered that Madame C. had a good deal of talk with her daily, in hours when they were alone; and before very long she permitted me to share her perplexities. She didn’t want to desert her young friend; but the girl seemed to have sunk into a kind of apathy. She thought, perhaps, a specialist ought to see her. A very American touch, that! Unluckily, the girl had no close kin; there was no one to turn her over to officially. “Before long, I knew the whole story. The young lady’s fiancé was a civil engineer, and had been employed by Portuguese interests in East Africa. He had gone into the interior--more or less--on a job for the Nyassa Company: headquarters, Mozambique. There was supposed to be money in it, because the Portuguese had been growing ashamed of their colonial reputation, and had been bucking up to some extent. Hence the job with the Nyassa Company. She had wanted to go out with him, but he would not permit it. Quite right, too. Mozambique’s no place for a woman--or Lourenço Marques, either. _I_ know. Damn their yellow, half-breed souls!... She had been waiting for him to finish his job in the interior, and come home to marry her. The date of their marriage, I imagine, had not been very far off.