Page:In a winter city, by Ouida.djvu/230

Rh he with her. People meeting them began to make conjectures, and bets, harder than ever; and Italian ladies, looking out of their carriage windows, wondered for the five-millionth time at the freedom of English women—as indeed Italian ladies have good cause to do in far more reprehensible liberties.

They walked down to the piazzone and back again. It was growing dusk. She went home to her hôtel, and let him enter with her, and had some tea by the firelight; all the while he made love to her with eyes and gesture and word, as only an Italian can, and she avoided explicit declaration of it, and direct need to reply to it, with all the consummate tact that ten years' practice in such positions had polished in her.

It was a charming pastime—were it nothing more. It was quite a pity when Madame Mila entered unsuspecting, and full of new wrongs in the matter of the Muscadins and fresh gossip concerning some forty people's marriages, divorces, debts, ignominies, and infamies. It is fortunate that there are so many wicked people in Society, for if there were not, what would the