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work-out. We’ll make a date for, say, next week. You’ll be impressed with his place, the Casa Rienzi. It’s genuine Palladian, come down in the world. But as with a classically beautiful woman, with the bone-structure still there, who’ll be lovely at eighty, it keeps its grace.’
    Ruth thought of the perfection of Stella Parioli’s features and understood the comparison. No doubt he was remembering it too. Aloud she said, ‘Does the Casa Rienzi belong to Signore Fonte?’
    ‘To Cesare? No. He rents it for the sake of the stable accommodation. Their own place—he has an older sister, Agnese—is deep in the South, in Calabria, where they have a small vineyard property, growing grapes and maize, but where people and tourists are too thin on the ground to merit a riding-school. So they let that in turn to a local farmer, and came north to Rome, though they’re both still homesick for their “ain folk”, I think.’
    As Erle stopped speaking the music slowed to its end, and he halted, holding Ruth off from him. ‘Thank you. Why don’t we do this more often?’ he said, his tone making the kind of question to which she knew he didn’t expect her either to reply or to take literally at all. Probably his favourite closing gambit to everyone he partnered.
    He delivered her back to Cesare Fonte, but after the floor-show when people were leaving, he came for her again to drive her back to the flat. He parked the car on the empty street and came with her to the door, at which she understood what he had meant by asking her permission to see the young people’s curfew kept. He expected to be asked in.
    Using her door key she fumbled, and he took it from her. Using it himself, opening the door and following her in, ‘You boasted that your reputation would stand up,’ he reminded her. ‘But I can wait in the car, if you’d rather?’
    ‘No, come up, please.’ What else could she say? Besides, it was a quarter to one already and, like him, she didn’t think the other two would be late.
    Nor were they. At a few minutes after one a car came noisily up the stone-paved street and stopped outside. After that there was silence—‘Saying their goodnights,’ Erle suggested. Then there was the sound of Cicely’s key in the street door; the car drove away and the other two went down to meet Cicely in the tiny hall.
    She was a little breathless and prettily flushed. ‘You see, Erle ,’ she panted, ‘one o’clock to the minute—right on time. But gosh — ’ she brushed back a strand of hair which had escaped from the elaborately piled curls—‘I’m tired! A lovely evening, Erle —thanks so much.’ She blew him a kiss and turned for the stairs, her long skirt lifted. ‘All I want now is my bed. I can hardly prop my eyelids open. Goodnight, dears— ’
    She went up.
    Erle laughed shortly. ‘Evidently she has been roundly kissed,’ he said.
    Ruth glanced up to the turn in the stairs where Cicely had disappeared. ‘What makes you think so? How do you know?’ she asked.
    His gesture was impatient. ‘My dear girl, you’ve only to use your eyes! In a woman it always shows. They wear a sort of—well, a glow. A smug glow, granted, but still a glow.’ He paused, then with that characteristic lift of the eyebrow, ‘If I knew you better, and the hour being the romantic one it is, I might be tempted to prove it to you, Q.E.D. But as things are, you won’t need to trouble your mirror to prove it to yourself. Because this ’—he took her hand and kissed the back of it lightly —‘doesn’t count. It’s just something I’ve learnt from the locals — ’
    And like ‘Why don’t we do this more often?’, another piece of his practised gallantry, thought Ruth when he had gone. She should have had ready some smart repartee, in order to make her ability to fence with words the equal of his. But that was the worst of wanting to believe people always meant what they said. Matter-of-fact yourself to a fault, you