He dropped the subject and turned back to his picture, and Marcia sat watching him as he industriously splashed in colour. Occasionally their eyes met when he raised his head, and if his own lingered a moment longer than convention warranted—being an artist, he was excusable, for she was distinctly an addition to the moss-covered fountain. The young man may have prolonged the situation somewhat; in any case, the sun’s rays were beginning to slant when he finally pocketed his colours and presented the picture with a bow. It was a dainty little sketch of a ruined grotto and a broken statue, with the sunlight flickering through the trees on the flower-sprinkled grass.
‘Really, is it for me?’ she asked. ‘It’s lovely, Mr. Dessart; and when I go away from Rome I can remember both you and the villa by it.’
‘When you go away?’ he asked, with an audible note of anxiety in his voice. ‘But I thought you had come to live with your uncle.’
‘Oh, for the present,’ she returned. ‘But I’m going back to America in the indefinite future.’
He breathed an exaggerated sigh of relief.
‘The indefinite future doesn’t bother me. Before it comes you’ll change your mind—everybody does. It’s merely the present I want to be sure of.’
Marcia glanced at him a moment with a half-provocative laugh; and then, without responding, she turned her head and appeared to study the stone village up on the height. She was quite conscious that he was watching her, and she was equally conscious that her pale-blue muslin gown and her rosebud hat formed an admirable contrast to the frowning old merman. When she turned back there was a shade of amusement in her glance. Paul did not speak, but he did not lower his eyes nor in any degree veil his visible admiration. She rose with a half-shrug and brushed back a stray lock of hair that was blowing in her eyes.
‘I’m hungry,’ she remarked in an exasperatingly matter-of-fact tone. ‘Let’s go back and get some tea.’
‘Will Mrs. Copley receive a jacket and knickerbockers?’
‘Mrs. Copley will be delighted. Visitors are a godsend at Villa Vivalanti.’