Page:Firecrackers a realistic novel.pdf/84

 ment. The long, sordid story—or at least as much of it as Ella cared to remember, which was considerable—had been retailed, and Campaspe found it simple to bring it back to mind now, in its general effect, if not in its details, although, at the time, it had not seemed to be anything more than the usual history of love and disillusion, complicated, to be sure, with an unbelievable amount of repetition. At this point in her reverie she found it expedient to consult the Countess's note, discovering therein that Madame Nattatorrini, after an absence of twenty-seven years, was returning to America, a strange decision, Campaspe reflected, for a woman who must be seventy-six or seventy-seven to make. The letter, the first Campaspe had ever received from the Countess, was formal in style and scrawled in that dispiriting chirography which betokens the palsied hand of the aged.

This, then, was the Nemesis of the Greeks, acting again in modern times: the Countess and Gareth were to meet, figuratively speaking, at least, in New York, after the lapse of twenty-seven years, after, moreover, the publication of Gareth Johns's latest novel, Two on the Seine, which, like Il Fuoco, tore away the veils from the soul of a silly woman in her middle years with an unrequited passion for a young boy. Considering these matters, Campaspe assured herself that her fallow period was at an end, if, indeed, it could be said ever really to have begun. . ..