“Did you know we were coming here?” asked Eleanor.

“I thought it likely.”

She shook hands with Mallard, but did not speak to him.  Eleanor offered to stay with her, as this would be their last visit, but Miriam said in a friendly manner that she preferred to be alone.  So they left her.

At the exit, Mallard saw his companions into a carriage, and himself walked on; but as soon as the carriage was out of sight, he turned back.  He had taken care to recover his permesso from the attendant, in the common way, when he came out, so that he could enter again immediately.  He walked rapidly to the place where they had left Miriam, but she was gone.  He went forward, and discovered her sitting before the Belvedere Apollo.  As his entrance drew her attention, he saw that she had an impulse to rise; but she overcame it, and again turned her eyes upon him, with a look in which self-control was unconsciously like defiance.

He sat down by her, and said: 

“I came to the Vatican this morning for the chance of meeting you.”

“I hope that was not your only reason for coming,” she returned, in a voice of ordinary civility.

“It was, in fact I should have asked you to let me have your company for an hour to-day, as it is practically your last in Rome; but I was not sure that you would grant it, so I took my chance instead.”

She waited a moment before replying.

“I am afraid you refer to your invitation of a few days ago.  I didn’t feel in the mood for going to a studio, Mr. Mallard.”

“Yes, I was thinking of that.  You refused in a way not quite like yourself.  I began to be afraid that you thought me too regardless of forms.”

His return had gratified her; it was unexpected, and she set her face in a hard expression that it might not betray her sudden gladness.  But the look of thinly-masked resentment which succeeded told of what had been in her mind since she encountered him in the company of Cecily.  That jealous pain was uncontrollable; the most trivial occasions had kept exciting it, and now it made her sick at heart.  The effort to speak conventionally was all but beyond her strength.

They had in common that personal diffidence which is one of the phases of pride, and which proves so fruitful a source of misunderstandings.  For all her self-esteem, Miriam could not obtain the conviction that, as a woman, she strongly interested Mallard; and the artist found it very hard to persuade himself that Miriam thought of him as anything but a man of some talent, whose attention was agreeable, and perhaps a little flattering.  Still, he could not but notice that her changed behaviour connected itself with Cecily’s arrival.  It seemed to him extraordinary, almost incredible, that she should be jealous of his relations with her sister-in-law.  Had she divined his passion for Cecily at Naples? (He cherished a delusion that the secret had never escaped him.) But to attribute jealousy to her was to assume that she set a high value on his friendship.