lightly on her soul.  She told everybody she had been to Rome; but imagination simply, refused to picture Mrs. Nevill Tyson in Rome.  Her presence in the Eternal City seemed something less than her footprint in its dust or her shadow on its walls.  Nothing is more irritating than to have your dream of a place destroyed by the light-hearted gabble of some idiot who has seen it; but Mrs. Nevill Tyson spared your dreams.  The most delicate ideal would have been undisturbed by the soft sweep of her generalities, or the graceful flight of her fancy from the matter in hand.

“There are a great many beautiful statues in the Vatican,” said Sir Peter in his dream.

“Oh, no end.  And, talking of beautiful statues, we were introduced to the most beautiful woman in Rome, the Countess—­Countess—­Countess—­Nevill, what was that woman’s name?  Oh—­I forget her name, but she was the loveliest woman I ever saw in my life.  Everybody was in love with her—­down on their knees groveling, you couldn’t help it.  Fancy, she was engaged to ten people at once!  I suppose she had ten engagement rings—­one for each finger, one for each man.  I should never have known which was which.  But oh!  I oughtn’t to have told you.  My husband said I wasn’t to talk about her.  I don’t see why—­everybody was talking about her!”

There was a chorus of protestation.

“And why shouldn’t they talk about her, and why shouldn’t she be engaged to ten gentlemen at once?  The more the merrier.”

“And you haven’t told us the lady’s name, so we’re none the wiser.”

“I forgot it.  But it would have been all the same if I hadn’t.  I never can remember not to tell things.  Oh—­Countess—­Poli—­Polidori!  There—­you see.  My husband says I’m the soul of indiscretion.”

There was a sudden silence.  Mrs. Nevill Tyson’s last sentence seemed to detach itself and float about the room, and Miss Batchelor perceived with a pang of pleasure that if Tyson’s wife was not vulgar she was an arrant fool.

“I suppose you visited all the great cathedrals?” said the Rector.  Perhaps he wished to change the subject; perhaps he felt that by talking about cathedrals to Mrs. Nevill Tyson he was giving a serious, not to say sacerdotal, character to a frivolous occupation.

“Well, only St. Peter’s and the one at Milan.”

“And which did you prefer!  I am told that St. Peter’s is very like our own St. Paul’s—­or I should say St. Paul’s—­”

“Oh, please don’t ask me!  I know no more than the man in the moon—­I mean the man in the honeymoon” (that joke was Tyson’s), “and a lot he knows about it.  There’s the man in the honeymoon,” she explained, nodding merrily in her husband’s direction.

Meanwhile Tyson was making himself agreeable to Miss Batchelor.  And this is how he did it.

“I hear, Miss Batchelor, that you are a lady of genius.”

There was a rumor that Miss Batchelor was engaged on a work of fiction, which indeed may have been true, though not exactly in the sense intended.