in the street:  men in their shirt sleeves, lounging, smoking, spitting (else the land were not Italy!), or perhaps playing cards at a table under the leafless bush of the wine-shop; women gossiping over their needlework, or, gathered in sociable knots, combing and binding up their sleek black hair; children sprawling in the kindly dirt; the priest, biretta on head, nose in breviary, drifting slowly upon some priestly errand, and “getting through his office;” and the immemorial goatherd, bare-legged, in a tattered sugar-loaf hat, followed by his flock, with their queer anxious faces, blowing upon his Pan’s-pipes (shrill strains, in minor mode and plagal scale, a music older than Theocritus), or stopping, jealously watched by the customer’s avid Italian eyes, to milk “per due centesimi”—­say, a farthing’s worth—­into an outstretched, close-clutched jug.  Sometimes the almond orchards give place to vineyards, or to maize fields, or to dusky groves of walnut, or to plantations of scrubby oak where lean black pigs forage for the delectable acorn.  Sometimes the valley narrows to a ravine, and signs of cultivation disappear, and the voice of the Rampio swells to a roar, and you become aware, between the hills that rise gloomy and almost sheer beside you, of a great solitude:  a solitude that is intensified rather than diminished by the sight of some lonely—­infinitely lonely—­grange, perched far aloft, at a height that seems out of reach of the world.  What possible manner of human beings, you wonder, can inhabit there, and what possible dreary manner of existence can they lead?  But even in the most solitary places you are welcomed and sped on by a chorus of bird-songs.  The hillsides resound with bird-songs continuously for the whole seven miles,—­and continuously, at this season, for the whole four-and-twenty hours.  Blackbirds, thrushes, blackcaps, goldfinches, chaffinches, sing from the first peep of dawn till the last trace of daylight has died out, and then the nightingales begin and keep it up till dawn again.  And everywhere the soft air is aromatic with a faint scent of rosemary, for rosemary grows everywhere under the trees.  And everywhere you have the purity and brilliancy and yet restraint of colour, and the crisp economy of line, which give the Italian landscape its look of having been designed by a conscious artist.

In and through his enjoyment of all these pleasantnesses, John felt that agreeable glow which he owed to his glimpse of the woman in the garden; and when at last he reached the Hotel Victoria, and, having dressed, found himself alone for a few moments with Lady Blanchemain, in the dim and cool sitting-room where she awaited her guests, he hastened to let her know that he shared her own opinion of the woman’s charms.

“Your beauty decidedly is a beauty,” he declared.  “I wish you could have seen her as I saw her an hour ago, with a white sunshade, against a background of ilexes.  It’s a thousand pities that painting should be a forgotten art.”