There was a rap on the door.

Lucy was straightening her hair just as the door burst open..

“Are you quite all right, my dear, Lucia?” Miss Bartlett inquired of her young cousin.

“Of course. Shall we go back down?”

Without waiting for a reply, Lucy hurried past Miss Bartlett, and before long, the two were once again situated at the dining room table with all of its members assembled exactly as they had left them, including the handsome young man who had so intimately descended upon Lucy in that upper hallway only moments ago. Had the two of them been left there alone for a moment longer, pray tell what would have become of her chaste virtue?

Lucy was a shambles, confused, and filled with unspeakable thoughts. How would he dare? Should she feel shame? She glimpsed at the young man, but what she saw astonished her; he appeared exactly as she had left him when he was seated at the table — untouched.

“Lucia,” said Miss Bartlett. “Do eat.”

Sweeping her eyes past the young man, Lucy forced herself to speak pleasantly to her cousin. “Charlotte,” she said, “don’t you feel, too, that we might be in London?? I can hardly believe that all kinds of other things are just outside. I suppose it is one’s being so tired.”

“This meat has surely been used for soup,” said Miss Bartlett, laying down her fork.

“I want so to see the Arno. The rooms the Signora promised us in her letter would have looked over the Arno. The Signora had no business to do it at all. Oh, it is a shame!”

“Any nook does for me,” Miss Bartlett continued; “but it does seem hard that you shouldn’t have a view.”

Lucy felt that she had been selfish. “Charlotte, you mustn’t spoil me: of course, you must look over the Arno, too. I meant that. The first vacant room in the front — ”

“You must have it,” said Miss Bartlett, part of whose travelling expenses were paid by Lucy’s mother — a piece of generosity to which she made many a tactful allusion.

“No, no. You must have it.”

“I insist on it. Your mother would never forgive me, Lucy.”

“She would never forgive me.”

The ladies’ voices grew animated, and — if the sad truth be owned — a little peevish. They were tired, and under the guise of unselfishness they wrangled. Some of their neighbours interchanged glances, and one of them — one of the ill-bred people whom one does meet abroad — leant forward over the table and actually intruded into their argument. He said:

“I have a view, I have a view.”

Miss Bartlett was startled. Generally at a pension people looked them over for a day or two before speaking, and often did not find out that they would “do” till they had gone. She knew that the intruder was ill-bred, even before she glanced at him. He was an old man, of heavy build, with a fair, shaven face and large eyes. There was something childish in those eyes, though it was not the childishness of senility. What exactly it was Miss Bartlett did not stop to consider, for her glance passed on to his clothes. These did not attract her. He was probably trying to become acquainted with them before they got into the swim. So she assumed a dazed expression when he spoke to her, and then said: “A view? Oh, a view! How delightful a view is!”