The ball ended, the guests gone, Vivalanti forgot its one burst of gaiety, and settled down again to its usual state of peaceful . The days were growing warmer. White walls simmering in the sunshine, garden borders with the hum of insects, the cool green of the ilex , the sleepy, slow drip of the fountain—it was all so beautifully Italian, and so very, very lonely! During the hot mid-days Marcia would sit by the ruins of the old villa or pace the shady ilex walks with her feelings in a . She had seen neither Paul Dessart nor Laurence Sybert since the evening of her birthday, and that moment by the fountain when the three had faced each other silently was not a pleasant memory. It was one, however, which many times a day.
Of Sybert Marcia heard no news whatever. In reply to her casual question as to when he would be at the villa again, her uncle had remarked that just at present Sybert had more important things to think of than taking a villeggiatura in the Sabine hills. But of Paul Dessart and the Roystons most unexpected news had come. Paul’s father had had an ‘attack’ brought on by overwork, and they were all of them going home. The letters were written on the train en route for Cherbourg; a long letter from Margaret, a short one from Eleanor. The latter afforded some food for reflection, but the reflection did not bring enlightenment.
‘Dear Marcia’ (it ran):
‘I am sorry not to see you again, and (to be quite frank) I am equally sorry not to have seen Mr. Sybert again. I feel that if I had had more time, and half a chance, I might have something in the interests of science.
‘Margaret told you, of course, that Paul is going back with us. We hope his father’s illness isn’t serious, but he preferred to go. There is nothing to keep him in Rome, he says. Poor fellow! you must write him a nice letter. Don’t worry too much about him, though; he won’t blow his brains out.
‘I could tell you something. I have just the tiniest suggestion of a suspicion which—granted fair winds and a prosperous voyage—may arrive at the dignity of news by 199 the time we reach the other side. However, you don’t deserve to hear it, and I shan’t tell. Have I aroused your curiosity ? If so, c’est .
‘I shall hope to see you in Pittsburg this autumn. That, my dear Marcia, is merely a polite phrase and is not true. I shall hope, rather, to see you in Paris or Rome or Vienna. I am afraid that I have the wander-habit to the end. The world is too big for one to settle down in one place—and that place Pittsburg; is it not so? One can never be happy for thinking of all the things that are happening in all of the places where one is not.
‘Au revoir, then, till autumn; we’ll play on the Champs-Elysées together.
‘Eleanor.’
A letter had come also from Marcia’s father, which put her in an uncomfortably unsettled frame of mind. It was written in the Copley of humorous of the situation; but, for all that, she could see that she had hurt him. He disavowed all knowledge and in the Triple Alliance and the Abyssinian war. He regretted the fact that the taxes were heavy, but he had had no hand in making up Italy’s financial budget. As to wheat, there were many reasons why Italy could not afford it, aside from the fact that it was dear. Marcia could give what she wished to the peasants to make up for her father, and he inclosed a blank cheque to her order—surely an excessive sign of on the part of a business man. The letter closed with the statement that he was lonely without her, and that she must come back to America next winter and keep her old father out of .
She read the last few sentences over twice, with a rising lump in her throat. It was true. Poor man, he must be lonely! She ought to have tried to take her mother’s place, and to have made a home for him before now. Her duty suddenly presented itself very clearly, and it appeared as uninviting as duties usually do. A few months before she would not have minded, but now Italy had got its hold upon her. She did not wish to go; she wished only to sit in the sunshine, happy, unthinking, and let the days slip idly by. A picture flashed over her of what the American life would be—a brownstone house on Fifth Avenue in the winter, a country place in the Berkshires in the summer; an aunt of her mother’s for chaperon, her father’s friends—lawyers and 200 bankers and who talked railroads and the Stock Exchange; for interests she would have balls and receptions, literary clubs and charities. Marcia breathed a doleful sigh. Her memories of the New York house were ; it was not a life she cared to renew. But nothing of all this did she let her father know. She sent a forgiving letter, with the promise that she would come home for the winter, and not a hint that the home-coming was not her own desire.
It seemed that, things having once commenced to change, everything was going. Mr. Copley himself exploded the next bombshell. He came back from Rome one night with the announcement that the weather was getting pretty hot, and the family ought to leave next week for Switzerland.
‘Oh, Uncle Howard, not yet!’ Marcia cried. ‘Let us wait until the end of June. It isn’t too hot till then. Up here in the hills it’s pleasant all summer. I don’t want to leave the villa.’
‘Rome is hot just now in more ways than one,’ he returned. ‘I’d feel safer to have you in Switzerland or up in the Tyrol during the excitement. Goodness only knows what’s going to happen next. I’m expecting to wake up in the middle of a French revolution every morning, and I should like to have you out of the country before the beheading begins.’
‘There isn’t really any danger of a revolution?’ she asked breathlessly.
‘Not in a country where every other man’s a soldier and the government’s in command. But there have been houses broken into and a good many acts of lawlessness, and we’re rather lonely off here.’
‘I hate to think of going away,’ Marcia sighed. ‘We’ll come back in the autumn, won’t we, Uncle Howard?’
‘Oh, yes, if you like. I dare say we could manage a month or so out here before we go into the palazzo for the winter.’
‘And I’ll be going back to America for the winter,’ she sighed.
He looked at her with a slight smile.
‘Are you the girl, Marcia, who used to preach sermons to your uncle about Americans living abroad?’
201 Marcia reflected his smile somewhat .
‘And I’m practising my own preaching, am I not?’
‘Oh, well,’ he said, ‘when the time comes you can do as you please. Your father can get along without you one year more.’
‘No, I think I ought to go, for of course he must be lonely but—I should like to stay! It seems more like home than any place I’ve ever been in. I’ve really never belonged anywhere before, and I like so much to be with you.’
‘Poor little girl! You have had a chequered career.’
‘Yes, Uncle Howard, I have; and it keeps on being chequered! I haven’t been in the villa three months, but really I don’t remember ever having lived so long in one place before. It’s been nice, hasn’t it? I hate dreadfully to have it end. It seems like shutting away............