“Ah, Mr. Carey—”
He checked himself abruptly, remembering whet he had heard from Robin Pierce.
“No, Mr. Pierce was my informant. He knows your place and says it’s too wonderful. I adore the name.”
“Casa Felice. You would not advise me to change it, then?”
“Change it! Why?”
“Well, I—one should not, perhaps, insist beforehand that one is going to have happiness, which must always lie on the knees of the gods.”
“Oh, I believe in defiance.”
There was an audacious sound in her voice. Her long talk with Leo Ulford had given her back her belief in herself, her confidence in her beauty, her reliance on her youth.
“You have a right to believe in it. But Casa Felice is mine.”
“Even to buy it was a defiance—in a way.”