“Lady Louisa FitzStephen, Miss Scope,” said her servant, opening the door.

VI

The nightingales sang him home, and the moon lighted him, the liquid moon of April and Italy.  As he approached the castle, through the purple and silver garden, amid the mysterious sweet odours of the night, he glanced up vaguely at the pavilion beyond the clock.  He glanced up vaguely, but next second he was no longer vague.

There, on a low-hung balcony, not ten feet above him, full in the moonlight, stood a figure in white—­all in white, with a scarf of white lace thrown over her dark hair.  The nightingales sang and sobbed, the moon rained its amethystine fire upon the earth, the earth gave forth its mysterious sweet night odours, and she stood there motionless, and breathed and gazed and listened.

But at the sound of wheels in the avenue, she turned slightly, and looked down.  Her face was fair and delicate and pure in the moonlight, and her eyes shone darkly bright.

She turned, and looked down, and her eyes met John’s.

“Given the hour and the place, I wonder whether I ought to bow,” he thought.

Before he could make up his mind, however, his hand had automatically raised his hat.

She inclined her head in acknowledgment, and something softly changed in her face.

“She smiled!” he said, and caught his breath, with a kind of astonished exultancy.

That soft change in her face came and went and came again through all his dreams.

PART THIRD

I

“Good morning, Prospero,” said Annunziata.

“Good morning, Wide-awake,” responded John.

He was in the octagonal room on the piano nobile of the castle, where his lost ladies of old years smiled on him from their frames.  He had heard an approaching patter of feet on the pavement of the room beyond; and then Annunziata’s little grey figure, white face, and big grave eyes, had appeared, one picture the more, in the vast carved and gilded doorway.

“I have been looking everywhere for you,” she said, plaintive.

“Poor sweetheart,” he commiserated her.  “And can’t you find me?”

“I couldn’t,” said Annunziata, bearing on the tense.  “But I have found you now.”

“Oh?  Have you?  Where?” asked he.

“Where?” cried she, with a disdainful movement.  “But here, of course.”

“I wouldn’t be too cocksure of that,” he cautioned her. “Here is a mighty evasive bird.  For, suppose we were elsewhere, then there would be here, and here would be somewhere else.”

“No,” said Annunziata, with resolution.  “Where a person is, that is always here.”

“You speak as if a person carried his here with him, like his hat,” said John.