before the Parthenon, rode the Argentina pampas, strolled nonchalantly into the Café de Paris at Monte Carlo, rested on the ancient stones at Taormina, below Ætna, invaded indifferently the depths of the Congo and the Colosseum at Rome, and, more frequently still and with the greatest delight of all, drove in an open carriage behind two horses in the Bois de Boulogne. Always, in these dream excursions, he was accompanied by a handsome, plump, red-haired woman, three times his age, who sat on the seat beside him or strolled with her hand on his arm. He had come, indeed, recognizing fully that some compromise is necessary in the primeval stages of any ambition, to regard the Countess as an essential factor in his immediate future. She was the way out, the prospective fulfiller of his visions, and he understood that in some inexplicable manner he signified to her a cognate form of release. Nevertheless, he could not help wondering why this woman who had lived with brilliant people in brilliant places, who had it in her power to occupy her apartment at Paris or her villas at Cannes and Settignano, had determined to visit her old home. Nor could he quite fathom why, once here, she had selected him as the beneficiary of her particular interest. The answers to these riddles were, in one sense, a mystery to him. His deep instinct, however, informed him that she was interested in him, that, quite possibly, he meant even more to her than she to him. His desirability lay,
