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“Yes, certainly, sir,” the man answered in careful English. “Is it not, perhaps, Mr. and Misses Gerald?” he smilingly insinuated, offering some cards.

“Miss Gerald,” the father corrected him as he took the cards. “Why, hello, Nannie! Here are the Bells! Where are they?” he demanded of the waiter. “Bring them here, and a lot more cups and saucers. Or, hold on! I’d better go myself, Nannie, hadn’t I? Of course! You get the crockery, waiter. Where did you say they were?” He bustled up from his chair, without waiting for a distinct reply, and apologized to Lanfear in hurrying away. “You’ll excuse me, doctor! I’ll be back in half a minute. Friends of ours that came over on the same boat. I must see them, of course, but I don’t believe they’ll stay. Nannie, don’t let Dr. Lanfear get away. I want to have some talk with him. You tell him he’d better come to the Sardegna, here.”

Lanfear and Miss Gerald sat a moment in the silence which is apt to follow with young people when they are unexpectedly left to themselves. She kept absently pushing the cards her father had given her up and down on the table between her thumb and forefinger, and Lanfear noted the translucence of her long, thin hand in the sunshine striking across the painted iron surface of the garden movable. The translucence had a pathos for his intelligence which the pensive tilt of her head enhanced. She stopped toying with the cards, and looked at the addresses on them.

“What strange things names are!” she said, as if musing on the fact, with a sigh which he thought disproportioned to the depth of her remark.

“They seem rather irrelevant at times,” he admitted, with a smile. “They’re mere tags, labels, which can be attached to one as well as another; they seem to belong equally to anybody.”

“That is what I always say to myself,” she agreed, with more interest than he found explicable.

“But finally,” he returned, “they’re all that’s left us, if they’re left themselves. They are the only signs to the few who knew us that we ever existed. They stand for our characters, our personality, our mind, our soul.”

She said, “That is very true,” and then she suddenly gave him the cards. “Do you know these people?”

“I? I thought they were friends of yours,” he replied, astonished.

She shook her head, and said, with her delicate quiet: “Nobody has been here, except–” She glanced at Lanfear, who smiled, but saw no opening for himself in the strange situation. Then she said: “I think I will go and lie down a while, now, papa. I’m rather tired. Good-bye,” she said, giving Lanfear her hand; it felt limp and cold; and then she turned to her father again. “Don’t you come, papa! I can get back perfectly well by myself. Stay with–“

“I will go with you,” her father said, “and if Dr. Lanfear doesn’t mind coming–“

“Certainly I will come,” Lanfear said, and he passed to the girl’s right; she had taken her father’s arm; but he wished to offer more support if it were needed. When they had climbed to the open flowery space before the hotel, she seemed aware of the groups of people about. She took her hand from her father’s arm, as if unwilling to attract their notice by seeming to need its help, and swept up the gravelled path between him and Lanfear, with her flowing walk.

Her father fell back, as they entered the hotel door, and murmured to Lanfear: “Will you wait till I come down?” … “I wanted to tell you about my daughter,” he explained, when he came back after the quarter of an hour which Lanfear had found rather intense. “It’s useless to pretend you wouldn’t have noticed–Had nobody been with you after I left you, down there?” He twisted his head in the direction of the pavilion, where they had been breakfasting.