The Port of Adventure. C. N. Williamson

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СКАЧАТЬ his palace in Rome, which her money restored, and his country place near Frascati. There was never the least scandal, only wild curiosity. Now she has cut the whole thing. Apparently couldn't stand the empty sort of life, or else he did something worse than usual, at which she drew the line."

      Angela did not much care whether people in Rome knew the truth or not. That no longer greatly mattered to her, because she meant never, never to go back to Rome, or to see Paolo di Sereno, or any of his friends—who had never really been her friends. But she did not want people on the ship to know, because she was tired of being talked about, and her hope was to begin a new and different life. For herself, she had nothing to conceal; but, she had never felt any pride or pleasure in being a princess, and after the flatteries and disillusions, the miseries and foolish extravagances of the last hateful, brilliant six years, everything connected with them, and the historic title her dead father's money had bought, was being eagerly obliterated by Franklin Merriam's daughter. She knew little about her forebears on her father's side, except that they were English, whereas Paolo had centuries behind him crammed full of glorious ancestors whose deeds were celebrated on tapestries of great beauty and value. Her one tolerable memory of Paolo was that he had never touched her hand since their marriage; but the memory of her father was sacred. She adored him, and was never weary of recalling things he had said to her, pleasures he had planned for her as a child, and, above all, his stories of California, whither she was now bound.

      Angela had taken the name of "Mrs. May"; May, because May was her birth-month, and also her middle name given by her father, whereas Angela had been her mother's choice. Therefore she was just superstitious enough to feel that "May" might bring happiness, since her father's memory was the single unshadowed spot in her life of twenty-three years. A brilliant life it would have seemed to most women, one to be envied; but Angela could not see why.

      The lashes which shaded her slate-gray eyes had that upward curl which shows an undying sense of humour, and she had been a merry little girl, with flashes of wit which had enchanted Franklin Merriam before she was snatched away to Europe at eleven, never to see him again. Even at school where she had been "dumped" (as Mrs. Merriam's intimate enemies put it), Angela had kept the girls laughing. Now, though she had imagined her gay spirit dead with childhood, she began to be visited by its ghost. She amused herself on shipboard with a thousand things, and a thousand thoughts which made her feel the best of "chums" with her new friend and companion, Angela May. "I've come back from twenty-three to seventeen," she thought, and pretended that there had never been an Angela di Sereno, that scornful young person who had forbidden the prince to come near her on learning that there was another whom he should have married instead of Millionaire Merriam's daughter.

      When she was a little girl in Boston (where Mrs. Merriam had insisted upon living), Angela used to sit on her father's knee; and as he curled her yellow hair over his fingers he wove romances of the Golden West, reluctantly deserted for his wife's sake; and though many illusions had broken like bright bubbles, this ideal still glittered before Angela's eyes. She had been promised by her father that she should visit California with him, when "Mother brought her back from Europe"; but he had died, and mother had not brought her back; so now she was going to make the pilgrimage alone. Not only did she intend to see the places her father had described, but when she had seen all and could choose, she meant to buy land and make a home for herself, her first real home.

      Wherever she decided to live, the house must be like the one where her father had been born—long and low built of adobe; there must be a patio, with a fountain in the middle; and the rooms must be kept cool by the roof of a veranda, shading the windows like a great overhanging eyelid. Lovely flowers she would have, of course, but the garden must be as unlike an Italian garden as possible. Italy was beautiful, but she did not wish to be reminded of that country, or any other in Europe where she had wandered in search of forgetfulness.

      She had little fear that ghosts of the past would come to haunt her in her new home, for though the Prince di Sereno had once cared for her in his way, she had struck at his pride and made him hate her in the end. At last he had been glad to let her go out of his life, for she had made arrangements by which he kept more than half her money. There was no danger that he would try to snatch her back again; and as for European friends and acquaintances, it was unlikely that such worldly persons would care to come to the place she meant to select. It would be far from the paths of tourists.

      The eight-day voyage passed pleasantly for Angela. She had spoken to no one except stewards and stewardesses for, taking her meals on deck, she had not come into contact with other passengers. The mourning she wore for her mother, who had died four months before in London, seemed to set her apart from others, though had it not been for the cause of her mourning, probably she would not now be on her way to America. It was a few weeks after Mrs. Merriam's death, when she had recovered from the shock which was hardly sorrow, that Angela said to herself: "Now she is beyond being grieved by anything I do, and I can go away—for good." For the girl had been under the frail cold woman's sway, as the strong man, Franklin Merriam, had been in his time; and Mrs. Merriam had derived such pleasure from having a daughter who was a Princess di Sereno that Angela could hardly have found courage to deprive her of it.

      At home, both in the country and at her palace in Rome, the Princess had been waited on by two French maids, one of whom dressed her, while the other kept her belongings in order. When she travelled, as she often did, one or both went with her; to Egypt; to Algeria; to Russia; to Paris; or to England. But "Mrs. May" had no maid; and, landing in New York, it seemed that she was the only person who did not meet with a welcome from friends on the dock.

      Suddenly, she ceased to enjoy her isolation. For the first time since leaving Rome "on a long visit to relatives in America" (according to newspaper paragraphs), the Princess di Sereno did not hug her loneliness and her secret. She hardly knew what to do as she stood under the big letter "M" waiting to have her luggage examined. Her fellow "M's" as well as all the other letters appeared to be having desperate trouble with the custom-house men, who clawed out the contents of their trunks and then calmly left the cowed owners to stuff everything back as best they could.

      Angela's heart beat fast when her turn came, and she wished for long-nosed, hard-voiced Josephine as a bulwark; but the ordeal was not as bad as she expected. She looked at her inquisitor with the air of a hunted child who had got lost and hardly hoped ever to be found; so the protective instincts were aroused, and the wind was tempered to the shorn lamb. In half an hour after the ship had docked, Mrs. May was inquiring of a large, obliging Irishman (who had a vast store of knowledge concerning all useful subjects) how on earth she was to secure a cab.

      Her hotel was decided upon, and rooms engaged. An old friend of Mrs. Merriam, a cosmopolitan American woman, had once praised the Hotel Valmont, Angela had remembered; and driving from Twenty-third Street up into the Forties, New York was almost as strange to her as if she had never seen it before. Indeed, she had seen little of it, for the Merriams had lived in Boston, and Angela was only eleven when she bade her father and America good-bye. How vividly that day came back to her now! She could see her father, and feel his kisses as he said, "Never mind, little girl. When mother brings you back then we'll have the time of our lives—just you and I—in California together."

      But that day did not bear thinking of. And, by and by, rattling through the bright, busy streets, in the vivifying sunshine, she began to feel happy again, as well as very young and eager.

      "This is the gate of my future, and I'm driving into it," she thought.

      The Hotel Valmont, which Mrs. Corning had said was small, loomed imposing to Angela's eyes, as her taxicab stopped before the ever-revolving glass wheel of the Fifth Avenue door. The building towered to a height of sixteen or seventeen storeys at least, and appeared only a lesser mountain among mountains.

      A polite man in livery bowed her through the swift whirl of the glass wheel, and she found herself in a large hall with floor and walls of marble. Formally cut laurel-trees grew СКАЧАТЬ