Through the great open windows of the room night with all her
stars was shining. Daphne sat by a carved table in the salon,
the clear light of a four-flamed Roman lamp falling on her hair
and hands. She was writing a letter, and, judging by her
expression, letter writing was a matter of life and death.

"I am afraid that I was brutal," the wet ink ran. "Every day on
the sea told me that. I was cowardly too."

She stopped to listen to the silence, broken only by the murmur
of insects calling to each other in the dark. Suddenly she
laughed aloud.

"I ought never to have gone so far away," she remarked to the
night. "What would Aunt Alice say? Anyway he is a gentleman,
even if he is a god!"

"For I thought only of myself," the pen continued, "and ignored
the obligations I had accepted. It is for you to choose whether
you wish the words of that afternoon unsaid."

The letter signed and sealed, she rose with a great sigh of
relief, and walked out upon the balcony. Overhead was the deep
blue sky of a Roman night, broken by the splendor of the stars.
She leaned over the stone railing of the balcony, feeling beneath
her, beyond the shadow of the cypress trees, the distance and
darkness of the Campagna. There was a murmur of water from the
fountain in the garden, and from the cascades on the hill.

"If he were Apollo," she announced to the listening stars, "it