that for the moment at any rate the world left nothing to be wished for, that the cup of his desire was full.  He didn’t even, now that he might do so, wish to talk to her.  To walk with her was enough,—­to enjoy her companionship in silence.  Yes, that was it—­companionship.  He caught at the word.  “That is what I have been unconsciously needing all along.  I flattered myself that I was luxuriating in the very absence of it.  But man is a gregarious animal, and I was deceived.”  So he could refer the effect of her propinquity to the mere gregarious instinct, not suspecting that a more powerful instinct was already awake.  Anyhow, his sense of that propinquity,—­his consciousness of her, gracefully moving beside him in the sweet weather, while her summery garments fluttered, and some strange, faint, elusive perfume was shaken from them,—­filled him with a satisfaction that for the moment seemed ultimate.  He had no wish to talk.  Their progress side by side was a conversation without words.  They were getting to know each other, they were breaking the ice.  Each step they took was as good as a spoken sentence, was a mutual experience, drawing them closer, helping to an understanding.  They walked slowly, as by a tacit agreement.

Silence, however, couldn’t in the nature of things last for ever.  It was she who presently broke it.

“I owe you,” she said, in her ivory voice, with her clean-cut enunciation, “a debt of thanks.”  And still again she smiled, as she looked over towards him, her dark eyes glowing, her dark hair richly drooping, in the shadow of a big hat of wine-coloured straw.

John’s eyes were at a loss.  “Oh—?” he wondered.

“For a pleasure given me by our friend Annunziata,” she explained.  “This morning she told me a most interesting parable about Death.  And she mentioned that it was you who had suggested to her to tell it me.”

“Oh,” said John, laughing, while the pink of his skin deepened a shade.  “She mentioned that, did she?  I’m glad if you don’t feel that I took a good deal upon myself.  But she had just told the same parable to me, and it seemed a pity it shouldn’t have a larger audience.”

Then, after a few more paces taken again in silence, “What a marvellous little person she is, Annunziata!” said Maria Dolores.

“She’s to a marvellous degree the right product of her milieu,” said John.

Maria Dolores did not speak, but her eyes questioned, “Yes?  How do you mean?”

“I mean that she’s a true child of the presbytery,” he replied, “and at the same time a true child of this Italy, where Paganism has never perfectly died.  She has been carefully instructed in her catechism, and she has fed upon pious legends, she has breathed an ecclesiastical atmosphere, until the things of the Church have become a part of her very bone.  She sees everything in relation to them, translates everything in terms of them.  But at the same time odd streaks of Paganism survive in her.  They survive a little—­don’t they?—­in all Italians.  Wherever she goes her eye reads omens.  She will cast your fortune for you with olive-stones.  The woods are peopled for her by fauns and dryads.  When she takes her walks abroad, I’ve no doubt, she catches glimpses of Proteus rising from the lake, and hears old Triton blow his wreathed horn.”