"You rather touch one on the quick, Mrs. Carnby. I think perhaps neither of us realizes what an extremely unusual conversation this has been."
"I shouldn't call it commonplace," said Mrs. Carnby, "and I think you've stood it beautifully. But I want to ask you one more question. Do you love Margery?"
"With all my heart and soul and strength, Mrs. Carnby!"
"Then, my dear young friend, it's time to think what you're about. There's only one thing for you to do. The path lies open before you—and I think you'll have the courage and the good sense, to say nothing of the common decency, to follow it!"
CHAPTER XI.
SOME AFTER-DINNER CONVERSATION.
Night in the garden of the Villa Rossignol was as night is nowhere else. The cool dusk softened the somewhat stilted formality of the flower-beds and winding walks, and mercifully blurred the uncompromising stiffness of the paved terrace, flanked by marble urns, and giving, in three broad steps, upon the lawn. At this season the air was neither warm nor chill, but so deliciously adjusted that, as it moved, its touch on the cheeks and forehead was like that of a woman's fingers. The stillness was emphasized rather than disturbed by a tiny tinkle of water, falling from ledge to ledge of a rockery hidden in the trees, and the sound, hardly less liquid, of a nightingale, rehearsing, pianissimo, snatches of the melody that midnight would hear in full. The darkness seemed to drip perfume: for the little seats and summer-houses, cunningly hidden here and there among the bosquets, were veritable bowers of roses, and the new grass and foliage had that fresh June smell which July, with its dust and scorching suns, so soon turns stale.