And with that rather an odd detail came back to him. Was she a foreigner?  For it came vaguely back that he, impulsive and unthinking, had spoken to her throughout in English.  “And anyhow,”—­this came distinctly back,—­“it was certainly in English that she thanked me.”

III

What passed for breakfast at the presbytery was the usual Continental evasion of that repast,—­bread and coffee, despatched in your apartment.  But at noon the household met to dine.

The dining-room, on the ground floor, long and low, with a vaulted ceiling, whitewashed, and a pavement of worn red tiles, was a clean, bare room, that (pervaded by a curious, dry, not unpleasant odour) seemed actually to smell of bareness, as well as of cleanliness.  There was a table, there was a dresser, there were a few unpainted deal chairs, rush-bottomed (exactly like the chairs in the church, in all Italian churches), and there was absolutely nothing else, save a great black and white Crucifix attached to the wall.  But, by way of compensation, its windows opened southwards, flooding it with sunshine, and commanding the wonderful perspective of the valley,—­the blue-grey hills, the snow-peaks, the blossoming low-lands, and the far-away opalescence that you knew to be the lake.

At noon the parroco, his niece Annunziata, and his boarder met to dine.

The parroco was a short, stout, florid, black-haired, hawk-nosed, fierce-looking, still youngish man, if five-and-forty may be reckoned youngish, with a pair of thin lips and powerful jaws which, for purposes of speech, he never opened if he could help it.  Never,—­till Sunday came:  when, mounting the pulpit, he opened them indeed, and his pent-up utterance burst forth in a perfect torrent of a sermon, a wild gush of words, shouted at the topmost stress of a remarkably lusty voice, arresting for a minute or two by reason of the sheer physical energy it represented, and then for a long half hour exquisitely tiresome.  But on week-days he maintained a prodigious silence, and this (as, though fierce-looking, he wasn’t in the least really fierce) it would often be John’s malicious study to tempt him to break.  Besides, to-day, John was honestly concerned with the pursuit of knowledge.

Accordingly, grace being said, “You never told me,” he began, assuming a mien of intelligent interest, “that the castle was haunted.”  He looked at the Napoleonic profile of Don Ambrogio, but from the tail of his eye he kept a watch as well upon Annunziata, and he saw that that wise little maiden became attentive.

“No,” said Don Ambrogio, between two spoonfuls of soup.

“You will conceive my astonishment, then,” continued John, urbanely, “when I discovered that it was.”

“It isn’t,” said Don Ambrogio.  He gave himself diligently to the business of the hour; his spoon flew backwards and forwards like a shuttle.  His napkin, tucked into his Roman collar, protected his bosom, an effective white cuirass.