“Don’t try to hoodwink me any longer,” remonstrated the lady, unbelieving.

“I’ve never in my life set eyes on her before,” he solemnly averred.

She scrutinized him sharply.

“Hand on heart?” she doubted.

And he, supporting her scrutiny without flinching, answered, “Hand on heart.”

“Well, then,” concluded she, with a laugh, “it looks as if I were even more of an old witch than I boasted—­and my thumbs pricked to some purpose.  Here’s the lady of the piece already arrived.  There, she’s going away.  How well she walks!  Have after her—­have after her quick, and begin your courtship.”

The smiling young woman, her lilac dress softly bright in the sun, was moving slowly down the garden path, towards the cloisters; and now she entered them, and disappeared.  But John, instead of “having after her,” remained at his counsellor’s side, and watched.

“She came from that low doorway, beyond there at the right, where the two cypresses are; and she came at the very climax of my vaticination,” said her ladyship.  “Without a hat, you’ll hardly dispute it’s probable she’s staying in the house.”

“No—­it certainly would seem so,” said John.  “I’m all up a tree.”

“The garden looks rather dreary and empty, now that she has left, doesn’t it?” she asked.  “Yet it looked jolly enough before her advent.  And see—­the lizards (there are four of them, aren’t there?) that whisked away from the dial at her approach, have come back.  Well, your work’s cut out.  I suppose it wouldn’t be possible for you to give a poor woman a dish of tea?”

“I was on the very point of proposing it,” said John.  “May I conduct you to my quarters?”

PART SECOND

I

Rather early next morning John was walking among the olives.  He had gone (straight from his bed, and in perhaps the least considered of toilets:  an old frieze ulster, ornamented with big buttons of mother-of-pearl, a pair of Turkish slippers, a bathing-towel over his shoulder, and for head-covering just his uncombed native thatch) he had gone for a swim, some half a mile upstream, to a place he knew where the Rampio—­the madcap Rampio, all shallows and rapids—­rests for a moment in a pool, wide and deep, translucent, inviting, and, as you perceive when you have made your plunge, of a most assertive chill.  Now he was on his leisurely way home, to the presbytery and what passed there for breakfast.

The hill-side rose from the river’s bank in a series of irregular terraces, upheld by rough stone walls.  The gnarled old trees bent towards each other and away like dwarfs and crook-backs dancing a fantastic minuet; and in the grass beneath them, where the sun shot his fiery darts and cast his net of shadows, Chloris had scattered innumerable wildflowers:  hyacinths, the colour of the sky; violets, that threaded