pride, or distrust, or jealousy, he could never be sure. He was secretly
irritated and humiliated by her power to oppose him and keep him at a
distance without ever seeming to do so; but, on the other hand, he was
very patient, very tenacious of his purpose, and very skilful. He knew
something of the Contessa's past, but he recognised in her the nature
that has known the world's worst side and has done with it for ever, and
is lifted above it, and he knew the immense influence which the
spectacle of a blameless life exercises upon the opinion of a good woman
who has not always been blameless herself. Whatever he had been before
he met his wife, whatever strange plans had been maturing in his brain
since he had married her, his life had seemed as spotless from that day
as the existence of the best man living. His wife believed in him, and
the Contessa did not; but even she must in time accept the evidence of
her senses. Then she, too, would trust him. Why it was essential that
she should, he alone knew, unless he was merely piqued by her quiet
reserve, as a child is when it cannot fix the attention of a grown-up
person.

The Contessa and her daughter were to be of the party that day, and the
carriage stopped where they lived, near the Forum of Trajan. They
appeared almost directly, the Contessa in grey with a grey veil and
Aurora dressed in a lighter shade, the thick plaits of her auburn hair
tied up short below her round straw hat, on the theory that she was
still a school-girl, whose skirt must not quite touch the ground, who
ought not to wear a veil, and whose mind was supposed to be a sensitive
blank, particularly apt to receive bad impressions rather than good
ones. In less than a year she would be dancing all night with men she
had scarcely heard of before, listening to compliments of which she had
never dreamt--of course not--and to declarations which no right-minded
girl one day under eighteen could under any circumstances be thought to