“He is going to a dinner at Roccadoro,” said Annunziata, while John’s back grew small and smaller in the distance.  “Did you see, he had a portmanteau under the seat?  He is going to a dinner of ceremony, and he will have his costume of ceremony in the portmaneau.  I wonder what he will bring back with him for me.  When he goes to Roccadoro he always brings something back for me.  Last time it was a box of chocolate cigars.  I should like to see him in his costume of ceremony.  Wouldn’t you?”

But the lady merely laughed.  And then, taking Annunziata’s chin in her hand, she looked down into her big clear eyes, and said, “I must be off now, to join Signora Brandi.  But I cannot leave without telling you how glad I am to have met you, and what pleasure I have derived from your conversation.  I hope we shall meet often.  Good-bye.”

“Good-bye, Signorina,” said Annunziata, becoming formally polite again.  “I shall always be at your service.”  And she dropped another courtesy.  “If you will come to see me at the presbytery,” she hospitably added, “I will show you my tame kid.”

“You are all that is most kind,” responded the lady, and went off smiling towards the castle.

Annunziata curled herself up in her old corner of the marble bench, and appeared to relapse into profound thought.

V

A curious little intimate inward glow, a sense, somewhere deep down in his consciousness, of elation and well-being, accompanied John all the way to Roccadoro, mingling with and sweetening whatever thoughts or perceptions occupied his immediate attention.  This was a “soul-state” that he knew of old, and he had no difficulty in referring it to its cause.  It was the glow and the elation which he was fortunate enough always to experience when his eye had been fed with a fresh impression of beauty; and he knew that he owed it to-day to the glimpse he had had, in the cool light under the ilexes, of a slender figure in lilac and a tiny figure in grey, beside a soft-complexioned old marble bench in the midst of a shadowy, sunny, brown and green Italian garden.

The drive to Roccadoro from Sant’ Alessina is a pleasant drive.  The road follows for the most part the windings of the Rampio, so that you are seldom out of sight of its gleaming waters, and the brawl of it, now louder, now less loud, is perpetually in your ears.  To right and left you have the tender pink of blossoming almonds, with sometimes the scarlet flame of a pomegranate; and then the blue-grey hills, mantled in a kind of transparent cloth-of-gold, a gauze of gold, woven of haze and sunshine; and then, rosy white, with pale violet shadows, the snow-peaks, cut like cameos upon the brilliant azure of the sky.  And sometimes, of course, you rattle through a village, with its crumbling, stained, and faded yellow-stuccoed houses, its dazzling white canvas awnings, its church and campanile, and its life that seems to pass entirely