'Yes!'—she said softly, looking down.
He thought that she was too shy to express herself. In reality her feeling was divided between her old enthusiasm and her new disillusion. She would have liked to tell him that his reading had reminded her of the book she loved. But the man, standing beside her, chilled her. She wished she had not spoken. It began to seem to her a piece of forwardness.
'Well, you're very kind'—he said, rather formally—'But I'm afraid it won't do. That lady there won't pass it.'
'What have I said?'—cried Mrs. Burgoyne, protesting.
Manisty laughed. 'Nothing. But you'll agree with me.' Then he gathered up his papers under his arm in a ruthless confusion, and walked away into his study, leaving discomfort behind him.
Mrs. Burgoyne sat silent, a little tired and pale. She too would have liked to praise and to give pleasure. It was not wonderful indeed that the child's fancy had been touched. That thrilling, passionate voice—her own difficulty always was to resist it—to try and see straight in spite of it.
* * * * *
Later that evening, when Miss Foster had withdrawn, Manisty and Mrs. Burgoyne were lingering and talking on a stone balcony that ran along the eastern front of the villa. The Campagna and the sea were behind them. Here, beyond a stretch of formal garden, rose a curved front of wall with statues and plashing water showing dimly in the moonlight; and beyond the wall there was a space of blue and silver lake; and girdling the lake the forest-covered Monte Cavo rose towering into the moonlit sky, just showing on its topmost peak that white speck which once was the temple of the Latian Jupiter, and is now, alas! only the monument of an Englishman's crime against history, art, and Rome. The air was soft, and perfumed with scent from the roses in the side-alleys below. A monotonous bird-note came from the ilex darkness, like the note of a thin passing bell. It was the cry of a small owl, which, in its plaintiveness and changelessness, had often seemed to Manisty and Eleanor the very voice of the Roman night.
Suddenly Mrs. Burgoyne said—'I have a different version of your Nemi story running in my head!—more tragic than yours. My priest is no murderer. He found his predecessor dead under the tree; the place was empty; he took it. He won't escape his own doom, of course, but he has not deserved it. There is no blood on his hand—his heart is pure. There!—I imagine it so.'
There was a curious tremor in her voice, which Manisty, lost in his own thoughts, did not detect. He smiled.