"I am glad to see you. I hoped you would come."

"I'm disturbing a new poem," said Carey.

Sir Donald's faded face acknowledged it.

"Sorry. I'll go."

"No, no. I have infinite leisure, and I write now merely for myself. I shall never publish anything more. The maunderings of the old are really most thoroughly at home in the waste-paper basket. Do sit down."

Carey threw himself into a deep chair and looked round. It was a room of books and Oriental china. The floor was covered with an exquisite Persian carpet, rich and delicate in colour, with one of those vague and elaborate designs that stir the imagination as it is stirred by a strange perfume in a dark bazaar where shrouded merchants sit.

"I light it with wax candles," said Sir Donald, handing Carey a cigar.

"It's a good room to think in, or to be sad in."

He struck a match on his boot.

"You like to shut out London," he continued.

"Yes. Yet I live in it."

"And hate it. So do I. London's like a black-browed brute that gets an unholy influence over you. It would turn Mark Tapley into an Ibsen man.

Yet one can't get away from it."

"It holds interesting minds and interesting faces."

"Didn't Persia?"

"Lethargy dwells there and in all Eastern lands."

"You have made up your mind to spend the rest of your days in the fog?"

"No. Indeed, only to-day I acquired a Campo Santo with cypress trees, in which I intend to make a home for any dying romance that still lingers within me."

He spoke with a sort of wistful whimsicality. Carey stared hard at him.

"A Campo Santo's a place for the dead."

"Why not for the dying? Don't they need holy ground as much?"

"And where's this holy ground of yours?"

Sir Donald got up from his chair, went over to the bureau, opened a drawer, and took out of it a large photograph rolled round a piece of wood, which he handed to Carey, who swiftly spread it out on his knees.

"That is it."

"I say, Sir Donald, d'you mind my asking for a whisky-and-soda?"

"I beg your pardon."

He hastily touched a bell and ordered it. Meanwhile Carey examined the photograph.

"What do you think of it?" Sir Donald asked.

"Well--Italy obviously."

"Yes, and a conventional part of Italy."

"Maggiore?"

"No, Como."

"The playground of the honeymoon couple."

"Not where my Campo Santo is. They go to Cadenabbia, Bellagio, Villa D'Este sometimes."

"I see the fascination. But it looks haunted. You've bought it?"

"Yes. The matter was arranged to-day."

The photograph showed a large, long house, or rather two houses divided by a piazza with slender columns. In the foreground was water. Through the arches of the piazza water was also visible, a cascade falling in the black cleft of a mountain gorge dark with the night of cypresses.

To the right of the house, rising from the lake, was a tall old wall overgrown with masses of creeping plants and climbing roses. Over it more cypresses looked, and at the base of it, near the house, were a flight of worn steps disappearing into the lake, and an arched doorway with an elaborately-wrought iron grille. Beneath the photograph was written, "_Casa Felice_."

"Casa Felice, h'm!" said Carey, with his eyes on the photograph.

"You think the name inappropriate?"

"Who knows? One can be wretched among sunbeams. One might be gay among cypresses. And Casa Felice belongs to you?"

"From to-day."

"Old--of course?"

"Yes. There is a romance connected with the house."

"What is it?"

"Long ago two guilty lovers deserted their respective mates and the brilliant world they had figured in, and fled there together."

"And quarrelled and were generally wretched there for how many months?"

"For eight years."

"The devil! Fidelity gone mad!"

"It is said that during those years the mistress never left the garden, except to plunge into the lake on moonlight nights and swim through the silver with her lover."

Carey was silent. He did not take his eyes from the photograph, which seemed to fascinate him. When the servant came in with the whisky-and-soda he started.