Before he spoke, she had given a quick order to the chauffeur to move on and leave the end of the mule path free. Now the heart of the motor began to beat, and the car rolled a few feet farther on. Vanno came out into the thick white dust of the much-travelled road, and he and Mary could both look up to the tablet he had mentioned.
It was an oblong piece of marble, set high on the face of gray rock which on one side walled the upper Corniche, Napoleon's road. On it was the curious inscription: "Remember eternal at my heart. February, 1881."
"It is so strange," Mary said, trying to seem at ease, and not show the slightest emotion. It was ridiculous to feel emotion! Yet she could not help being absurdly happy, because this man who had snubbed her once and apparently disapproved her always was speaking to her of his own accord, in kindness.
"'Remember eternal at my heart?' It's like the English of a person not English. But why did he not have the words put in his own language, which he knew?"
"That is what everybody wonders," Vanno said, finding it as difficult as Mary found it, not to show that this conversation was of immense, exciting importance. "It puzzled me so much when I first came this way that I couldn't get it out of my head. I asked a friend who has lived for years not many miles away, if he could tell me what it meant."
"And could he tell you?"
"He told me a story which he believed but would not vouch for. Only, a very old inhabitant told it to him. It appeals to me as true. It must be true." A new warmth stole into Vanno's voice as he spoke. They had both been looking up at the tablet on the rock, but as that thrill like a chord on a violin struck her ear, Mary turned to him. Their eyes met, as they had so often met, but to-day there was no coldness in Vanno's, or hurt pride in Mary's.
"Can you think of any reason for the bad English?" he asked. He longed to hear what she would say.
She thought for a minute. "Could it be," she reflected aloud, "that the person who had the tablet put up associated this place with some one who was English—maybe a woman, if he was a man—and so he wanted to use her language, not his own?"
"You have guessed right!" exclaimed Vanno, boyishly delighted with her intuition. "He was an Italian. He loved an English girl." The romantic dark eyes which had so often burned with gloomy fire in looking at her burned with a different flame for an instant; then quickly, as if with a common impulse, the girl and the man tore their looks apart. "They met here on the Riviera," Vanno went on, not quite steadily. "It was at this spot they first found out that they loved each other, according to the story of my friend."