"Not a place to be alone in," he said.

He drank, and stared again at the photograph.

"There's something about the place that holds one even in a photograph,"

he added.

"One can feel the strange intrigue that made the house a hermitage. It has been a hermitage ever since."

"Ah!"

"An old Italian lady, very rich, owned it, but never lived there. She recently died, and her heir consented to sell it to me."

"Well, I should like to see it in the flesh--or the bricks and mortar.

But it's not a place to be alone in," repeated Carey. "It wants a woman if ever a house did."

"What sort of woman?"

Sir Donald had sat down again on the chair opposite, and was looking with his exhausted eyes through the smoke of the cigars at Carey.

"A fair woman, a woman with a white face, a slim woman with eyes that are cords to draw men to her and bind them to her, and a voice that can sing them into the islands of the sirens."

"Are there such women in a world that has forgotten Ulysses?"

"Don't you know it?"

He rolled the photograph round the piece of wood and laid it on a table.

"I can only think of one who at all answers to your description."

"The one of whom I was thinking."

"Lady Holme?"

"Of course."

"Don't you think she would be dreadfully bored in Casa Felice?"

"Horribly, horribly. Unless--"

"Unless?"

"Who knows what? But there's very often an unless hanging about, like a man at a street corner, that--" He broke off, then added abruptly, "Invite me to Casa Felice some day."

"I do."

"When will you be going there?"

"As soon as the London season is over. Some time in August. Will you come then?"

"The house is ready for you?"

"It will be. The necessary repairs will be begun now. I have bought it furnished."

"The lovers' furniture?"

"Yes. I shall add a number of my own things, picked up on my wanderings."

"I'll come in August if you'll have me. But I'll give you the season to think whether you'll have me or whether you won't. I'm a horrible bore in a house--the lazy man who does nothing and knows a lot. Casa Felice--Casa Felice. You won't alter the name?"

"Would you advise me to?"

"I don't know. To keep it is to tempt the wrath of the gods, but I should keep it."

He poured out another whisky-and-soda and suddenly began to curse Miss Schley.

Sir Donald had spoken to her after Mrs. Wolfstein's lunch.

"She's imitating Lady Holme," said Carey.

"I cannot see the likeness," Sir Donald said. "Miss Schley seems to me uninteresting and common."

"She is."

"And Lady Holme's personality is, on the contrary; interesting and uncommon."

"Of course. Pimpernel Schley would be an outrage in that Campo Santo of yours. And yet there is a likeness, and she's accentuating it every day she lives."

"Why?"

"Ask the women why they do the cursed things they do do."

"You are a woman-hater?"

"Not I. Didn't I say just now that Casa Felice wanted a woman? But the devil generally dwells where the angel dwells--cloud and moon together.

Now you want to get on with that poem."

Half London was smiling gently at the resemblance between Lady Holme and Miss Schley before the former made up her mind to ask the latter to "something." And when, moved to action by certain evidences of the Philadelphia talent which could not be misunderstood, she did make up her mind, she resolved that the "something" should be very large and by no means very intimate. Safety wanders in crowds.

She sent out cards for a reception, one of those affairs that begin about eleven, are tremendous at half past, look thin at twelve, and have faded away long before the clock strikes one.

Lord Holme hated them. On several occasions he had been known to throw etiquette to the winds and not to turn up when his wife was giving them.

He always made what he considered to be a good excuse. Generally he had "gone into the country to look at a horse." As Lady Holme sent out her cards, and saw her secretary writing the words, "Miss Pimpernel Schley,"

on an envelope which contained one, she asked herself whether her husband would be likely to play her false this time.

"Shall you be here on the twelfth?" she asked him casually.

"Why? What's up on the twelfth?"

"I'm going to have one of those things you hate--before the Arkell House ball. I chose that night so that everyone should run away early! You won't be obliged to look at a horse in the country that particular day?"