And just at this crisis the Cardinal and Emilia appeared,

climbing the terrace steps.

"Bother!" exclaimed the Duchessa, under her breath. Then, to

Peter, "It will have to be for another time--unless I die of

the suspense."

After the necessary greetings were transacted, another elderly

priest joined the company; a tall, burly, rather florid man,

mentioned, when Peter was introduced to him, as Monsignor

Langshawe. "This really is her chaplain," Peter concluded.

Then a servant brought tea.

"Ah, Diamond, Diamond, you little know what mischief you might

have wrought," he admonished himself, as he walked home through

the level sunshine. "In another instant, if we'd not been

interrupted, you would have let the cat out of the bag. The

premature escape of the cat from the bag would spoil

everything."

And he hugged himself, as one snatched from peril, in a qualm

of retroactive terror. At the same time he was filled with a

kind of exultancy. All that he had hoped had come to pass, and

more, vastly more. Not only had he been received as a friend

at Ventirose, but he had been encouraged to tell her a part at

least of the story by which her life and his were so curiously

connected; and he had been snatched from the peril of telling

her too much. The day was not yet when he could safely say,

"Mutato nomine. . . . ." Would the day ever be? But,

meanwhile, just to have told her the first ten lines of that

story, he could not help feeling, somehow advanced matters

tremendously, somehow put a new face on matters.

"The hour for which the ages sighed may not be so far away as

you think," he said to Marietta. "The curtain has risen upon

Act Three. I fancy I can perceive faint glimmerings of the

beginning of the end."




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