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bowed and did not offer her hand. 'Mr. Cuncliffe, I presume.'

'Yes,' said the young man waiting for her in the candlelight of the pension drawing-room. 'I'm driving back to my own little villa to-night, but first I wished to know that you had arrived safely. And Gian here,'—Gian and he spoke in Italian—'you have been a good dog?'

'Oh, Gian has done everything.'

'Then watch the servants with the lady's luggage.'

'Gian's a good man,' he said when he was gone, 'and the most religious I have ever known, but he didn't make you go to church every day, did he?'

'Every day.'

'The rascal! I warned him that you were a heretic and would not wish to go to church. Evidently he tried to save your soul.'

'But I liked going to church—at least over here.'

He surprised her by saying, 'It is one of the pleasures of life.'

He was an ardent-looking young man, and in the candlelight she did not notice that he was very sick. He had a magnetism that drew her. She felt at peace with him and could not understand how, under the