“My poor child,” he said, resting his hand on her curls, and gently smoothing them.  “You are what the French call an enfant terrible.  You are what the English call a deuced sharp little pickle.  And I must try, if I can, without actually lying, to persuade you that you are utterly mistaken, utterly and absolutely mistaken,”—­he raised his voice, for greater convincingness,—­“and that her name is nothing distantly resembling the name that you have spoken, and that in fact her name is Mrs. Harris, and that in fine there is no such person, and that I was merely talking hypothetically, in abstractions; I must draw a herring across the trail, I must raise a dust, and throw a lot of it into your amazingly clear-sighted little eyes.  Now, is it definitely impressed upon you that her name is not—­the thrice-adorable name you mentioned?”

“I thought it was,” answered Annunziata.  “I am sorry it is not.”  And then she dismissed the subject.  “See, it is raining harder.  See how the rain comes down in long strings of beads,—­see how it is like a network of long strings of glass beads falling through the air.  When the rain comes down like that, it means that after the rain stops it will be very hot.  To-morrow it will be very hot.”

The bell in the clock-tower tolled out seven solemn strokes; then the lighter-toned and nimbler-tongued bell of the church began to ring.

“Come,” peremptorily said Annunziata, jumping up.  “Mass.”

She held out her hand, took John’s, and, like a mother, led the meek and unquestioning young man to his duties.

II

Of course there are no such heretical inventions as pews in the parish church of Sant’ Alessina.  You sit upon orthodox rush-bottomed chairs, you kneel upon orthodox bare stones.  But at the Epistle side of the altar, at an elevation of perhaps a yard from the pavement, there is a recess in the wall, enclosed by a marble balustrade, and hung with faded red curtains, which looks, I’m afraid, a good deal like a private box at a theatre, and is in fact the tribune reserved for the masters of the Castle. (In former days those masters were the Sforzas.  So, from this tribune, the members of that race of iron and blood, of fierceness and of guile, have assisted at the mystical sacrifice of the Lamb of God!) Heretofore, during John’s residence at the presbytery, the tribune had stood vacant.  To-day it was occupied by Maria Dolores and Frau Brandt.  Maria Dolores, instead of wearing a hat, had adopted the ancient and beautiful use of draping a long veil of black lace over her dark hair.

John knelt in the middle of the church, in the thick of the ragged, dirty, unsavoury villagers.  When Mass was over, he returned to the cloisters, and there, face to face, he met the lady of his dreams.

She graciously inclined her head.

“Good morning,” she said, smiling, in a voice that seemed to him full of morning freshness.