cousin or something like that; he might even be her betrothed in the
peculiar American arrangement of such affairs. Personally people saw in
him a serious-looking young man, better dressed and better mannered than
they thought most Americans, and unquestionably handsomer, with his
Spanish skin and eyes, and his brown beard of the Vandyke cut which was
then already beginning to be rather belated.

Other Americans in the hotel were few and transitory; and if the English
had any mind about Miss Gerald different from their mind about other
girls, it would be perhaps to the effect that she was quite mad; by this
they would mean that she was a little odd; but for the rest they had
apparently no mind about her. With the help of one of the English ladies
her father had replaced the homesick Irish maid whom he had sent back to
New York from Genoa, with an Italian, and in the shelter of her gay
affection and ignorant sympathy Miss Gerald had a security supplemented
by the easy social environment. If she did not look very well, she did
not differ from most other American women in that; and if she seemed to
confide herself more severely to the safe-keeping of her physician, that
was the way of all women patients.

Whether the Bells found the spectacle of depravity at Monte Carlo more
attractive than the smiling face of nature at San Remo or not, they did
not return, but sent for their baggage from their hotel, and were not
seen again by the Geralds. Lanfear's friend with the invalid wife wrote
from Ospedaletti, with apologies which inculpated him for the
disappointment, that she had found the air impossible in a single day,
and they were off for Cannes. Lanfear and the Geralds, therefore,
continued together in the hotel without fear or obligation to others,
and in an immunity in which their right to breakfast exclusively in that
pavilion on the garden wall was almost explicitly conceded. No one,