He laid a bulky package in her lap. "Here are the maps and photographs."

"Oh, this is the villa." Alice's eye ran with delight over the views as she spread them before her. "Tell me everything about it."

"I have not seen it since I was a boy. But above Stresa a pebbled Roman highway winds into the northern hills. It is flanked with low walls of rotten stone and shaded with plane trees. Half an hour above the town an ilex grove marks a villa entrance."

He handed her a photograph. "This is the grove, these are the gates--they are by Krupp, and you will like them. Above them are the Dutch Kimberly arms--to which we have no right whatever that I can discover. But wasn't it delightfully American for Dolly to appropriate them?

"The roadway grows narrower as it climbs. Again and again it sinks into the red hill-side, leaving a wall tapestried with ivy. Indeed, it winds about with hardly any regard for a fixed destination, but the air is so bland and the skies at every turn are so soft, that pretty soon you don't care whether you ever get anywhere or not. The hills are studded with olives and oranges.

"When you have forgotten that you have a destination the road opens on a lovely _pineto_. You cross it to a casino on the eastern edge and there is the lake, two hundred feet below and stretching away into the Alps.

"Above the casino you lose yourself among cedars, chestnuts, magnolias, and there are little gorges with clumps of wild laurel. Figs and pomegranates begin beyond the gorge. The arbors are hidden by oleander trees and terraces of camellias rise to the belvedere--the tree you see just beside it there is a magnolia.

"Back of this lies the garden, laid out in the old Italian style, and crowning a point far above the lake stands the house. The view is a promise of paradise--you have the lake, the mountains, the lowlands, the walnut groves, yellow campaniles, buff villas, and Alpine sunsets."

"You paint a lovely picture."

"But incomplete; to-night you are free to tell me when I can take you.

Make it an early day, Alice. The moment we are married, we start. We will land at any little port along the Riviera that strikes your fancy, have a car to meet us, and drive thence by easy stages to the lake. From the moment we touch at Gibraltar you will fall in love with everything anew; there is only one Mediterranean--one Italy, cara mia ben. Let us go in. I want you to sing my song."

They walked into the house and to the dimly lighted music room. There they sat down together on the piano bench and she sang for him, "Caro Mio Ben."

[Ill.u.s.tration: She sang for him "Caro Mio Ben"]

CHAPTER x.x.xV

Not every day brought unalloyed happiness. Moments of depression a.s.serted themselves with Alice and, if tolerated, led to periods of despondency. She found herself seeking a happiness that seemed to elude her.

Even her depression, banished by recreation, left behind something of a painful subconsciousness like the uneasy subsidence of a physical pain.

Activity thus became a part of her daily routine and she gained a reputation for lively spirits.

Kimberly, whose perception was not often at fault, puzzled over the strain of gayety that seemed to disclose a new phase in Alice's nature.

Once, after a gay day at Sea Ridge, he surprised her at home in the evening and found her too depressed to dissemble.

"Now," he said, taking both her hands, "you are going to tell me what the matter is."

"Robert, nothing is the matter."

"Something is the matter," he persisted. "Tell me what it is."

"It is less than nothing. Just a miserable spectre that haunts me sometimes. And when I feel in that way, I think I am still his wife.

Now you are vexed with me."

"Not for an instant, darling; only perplexed. Your worries are mine and we must work out some relief for them, that is all. And when things worry me you will help me do away with my spectres, won't you?"

He soothed and quieted her, not by ridicule and harshness but by sympathy and understanding, and her love for him, which had found a timid foothold in the frailest response of her womanly reserve, now sent its roots deep into her nature.

It was nothing to her that he was great in the world's eyes; that in itself would have repelled her--she knew what the world would say of her ambition in marrying him. But he grew in her eyes because he grew in her heart as she came to realize more and more his solicitude for her happiness--the only happiness, he told her, in which he ever should find his own.

"I know how it will end, Robert." They were parting after a moment the most intense they had ever allowed themselves together. She was putting away his unwilling arms, as she looked in the darkness of the garden up into his face.

"How will it end?" he asked.

"In my loving you as much as you love me."

Winter pa.s.sed and the spring was again upon them before they realized it. In the entertaining around the lake they had been feted until it was a relief to run away from it all, as they often did. To escape the park-like regularity of their own domains, they sought for their riding or driving the neglected country below the village. Sometimes on their horses they would explore the backwoods roads and attempt swampy lanes where frogs and cowslips disputed their entry and boggy pools menaced escape.

Alice, hatless and flushed with laughter and the wind, would lead the way into abandoned wood-paths and sometimes they found one that led through a forest waste to a hidden pond where the sun, unseen of men, mirrored itself in gla.s.sy waters and dogwood reddened the margin where their horses drank.

In the woods, if she offered a race, Kimberly could never catch Alice no matter what his mount. She loved to thread a reckless way among sapling trees, heedless of branches that caught her neck and kissed her cheeks as she hurried on--riding gave them delightful hours.

They were coming into the village one May morning after a long cross-country run when they encountered a procession of young girls moving across the road from the parish school to the church and singing as they went. The church itself was _en fete_. Country folk gathered along the road-side and cl.u.s.tered about the church door where a priest in surplice waited the coming procession.

Kimberly and Alice, breathing their horses, halted. Dressed in white, like child brides, the little maidens advanced in the sunshine, their eyes cast down in recollection and moving together in awkward, measured step. From their wrists hung rosaries. In their clasped hands they carried prayer-books and white flowers, and white veils hung from the rose wreaths on their foreheads.

"How pretty!" exclaimed Kimberly as the children came nearer.

"Robert," asked Alice suddenly, "what day is this?"

"Thursday, isn't it?"

"It is Ascension Thursday."

The church-bells began to ring clamorously and the little girls, walking slowly, ceased their song. The lovers waited. Childhood, hushed with expectancy and moving in the unconscious appeal of its own innocence, was pa.s.sing them.

The line met by the young priest reached the open door. Kimberly noted the wistful look in Alice's eyes as the little band entered the church.

She watched until the last child disappeared and when she spoke to her horse her eyes were wet. Her companion was too tactful to venture a question. They rode until his silence told her he was aware of her agitation and she turned to him.

"Do you know," she said, slowly searching his eyes, "that you are awfully good?"

"If I am," he responded, "it is a discovery. And the honor, I fear, is wholly yours."

"It is something," she smiled, her voice very sweet, "to have lived to give that news to the world."

They rode again in silence. She felt it would be easier if he were to question her, but it was only after some time that he said: "Tell me what the little procession was about."

"I am ashamed to have acted in this way. But this was the day of my First Communion, Ascension Thursday. It was only a coincidence that I should see a First Communion cla.s.s this morning."

"What is First Communion?"

"Oh, don't you know?" There was a sadness in the tone. "You don't, of course, you dear pagan. It is _you_ who should have been the Christian and I a pagan. You would never have fallen away."

"You only think you have fallen away, Alice. You haven't. Sometimes you seem to act as if you had fallen from some high estate. You have not; don't think it. You are good enough to be a saint--do you give me credit for no insight? I tell you, you haven't fallen away from your religion. If you had, you would be quite at ease, and you are very ill at ease over it. Alice," he turned about in his saddle, "you would be happier if our marriage could be approved by your church."

"It never can be."