"… He offered me my education—my chance. I took it. I went to the conservatory at Cincinnati. Then he wanted to marry me, and promised to send me abroad to study more."… Her tone was dry, impartially recounting the fact. Then her eyes dropped, and Vickers's cigarette glowed between them as they leaned across the little iron table…. "I was a child then—did not know anything. I married him. The first years business was poor, and he could not let me have the money. When times got better, he let me come—kept his promise. I have been here nearly three years, back two or three times. And now," her voice dropped, "I must go back for good—soon."
Nothing more. But it seemed to Vickers as if a ghost had risen from the river mist and come to sit between them. That the woman was paying a price for her chance, a heavy price, he could see. They walked back to the city between the deserted vineyards. As they crossed the river, Mrs. Conry stopped, and remarked sombrely, "A bargain is a bargain the world over, is it not?"
Vickers felt the warm breathing woman close to him, felt her brooding eyes.
"One pays," he murmured, "I suppose!"
She threw up her hand in protest, and they walked on into the lighted city.
* * * * *
Occasionally Fosdick joined their excursions, and after one of them he said to Vickers:—
"My friend, she is wonderful; more so every time I see her. But beneath that soft, rounded body, with its smooth white skin, is something hard. Oh, I know the eyes and the hair and the throat and the voice! I, too, am a man. Paint her, if you like, or set her to music. She is for bel canto and moonlight and the voice of Rome. But there is a world outside this all, my friend, to which you and I belong, and you rather more than I…. Stacia Conry doesn't belong at all."
"Which means?" demanded Vickers steadily of the burly Fosdick.
"Take care that you don't get stuck in the sea of Sargasso. I think something bitter might rise out of all that loveliness."
Nevertheless, instead of going to the Maloya with Fosdick, Vickers stayed on in Rome, and September found him there and Mrs. Conry, too, having returned to the city from the mountain resort, where she had left the little girl with her governess. They roamed the deserted city, and again began to work on the songs which Mrs. Conry hoped to give in concerts on her return to America. Very foolish of the young man, and the woman, thus to prolong the moment of charm, to linger in the Sargasso Sea! But at least with the man, the feeling that kept him in Rome those summer months was pure and fine, the sweetest and the best that man may know, where he gives of his depths with no thought of reward, willing to accept the coming pain…. Little Delia, who had seen quite as much of Vickers as her mother, said to him the day she left with her governess:—