'Ought we not to be going?' Lucy whispered in her ear. 'I am sure you are tired.'
Eleanor rose. She took the girl's hand in a clinging grasp, while she turned smiling to her neighbour the Dane:
'We must be moving to the Villa Borghese—some friends will be meeting us there. Our train does not go for a long, long while.'
'Does any Roman train ever go?' said Doctor Jensen, stroking his straw-coloured beard. 'But why leave us, Madame? Is not one garden as good as another? What spell can we invent to chain you here?'
He bowed low, smiling fatuously, with his hand on his heart. He was one of the most learned men in the world. But about that he cared nothing. The one reputation he desired was that of a 'sad dog'—a terrible man with the ladies. That was the paradox of his existence.
Eleanor laughed mechanically; then she turned to Lucy.
'Come!' she said in the girl's ear, and as they walked away she half closed her eyes against the sun, and Lucy thought she heard a gasp of fatigue. But she spoke lightly.
'Dear, foolish, old man! he was telling me how he had gone back to the Hermitage Library at St. Petersburg the other day to read, after thirty years. And there in a book that had not been taken down since he had used it last he found a leaf of paper and some pencil words scribbled on it by him when he was a youth—"my own darling." "And if I only knew now vich darling!" he said, looking at me and slapping his knee. "Vich darling"!' Eleanor repeated, laughing extravagantly. Then suddenly she wavered. Lucy instinctively caught her by the arm, and Eleanor lent heavily upon her.
'Dear Mrs. Burgoyne—you are not well,' cried the girl, terrified. 'Let us go to a hotel where you can rest till the train goes—or to some friend.'
Eleanor's face set in the effort to control herself—she drew her hand across her eyes. 'No, no, I am well,' she said, hurriedly. 'It is the sun—and I could not eat at luncheon. The Ambassador's new cook did not tempt me. And besides'—she suddenly threw a look at Lucy before which Lucy shrank—'I am out of love with myself. There is one hour yesterday which I wish to cancel—to take back. I give up everything—everything.'