“Oh, my dear true Heart,” responded Maria Dolores, laughing.  She crossed the room, and placed her hand affectionately upon Frau Brandt’s shoulder.  “My dearest old Nurse!  Do not distress yourself.  This is not yet a question of actuality.  Let us not cry before we are hurt.”  And she stooped, and kissed her nurse’s brown old brow.

But afterwards she stood looking with great pensiveness out of the window, stood so for a long while; and I fancy there was a softer glow than ever in her soft-glowing eyes, and perhaps a livelier rose in her pale-rose cheeks.

“What are you thinking so deeply about?” Frau Brandt asked by-and-by.

Maria Dolores woke with a little start, and turned from the window, and laughed again.

“Oh, thinking about my cobbler’s son, of course,” she said.

VI

Annunziata, seeking him to announce that supper was ready, found John, seated in his chamber of dead ladies, his arms folded, his legs crossed, his eyes fixed, a frown upon his prone brow; his spirit apparently rapt in a brown study.

“Eh!  Prospero!” she called.

Whereat he came to himself glanced up, glanced round, changed his posture, and finally, rising, blew his preoccupations from him in a deep, deep sigh.

“Oh, what a sigh!” marvelled Annunziata, making big eyes.  “What are you sighing so hard for?”

John looked at her, and smiled.

“Sighing for my miller’s daughter, my dear,” he said.

And, as he followed her to the presbytery, he sang softly to himself—­

     "It is the miller’s daughter,
       And she is grown so dear, so dear,
     That I would be the jewel
       That trembles in her ear."

PART FIFTH

I

It was Sunday.  It was early morning.  It was raining,—­a fine quiet, determined rain, that blurred the lower reaches of the valley, and entirely hid the mountain-tops, so that one found it hard not to doubt a little whether they were still there.  Near at hand the garden was as if a thin web of silver had been cast over it, pale and dim, where wet surfaces reflected the diffused daylight.  And just across the Rampio, on the olive-clad hillside that rose abruptly from its brink, rather an interesting process was taking place,—­the fabrication of clouds, no less.  The hillside, with its rondure of blue-grey foliage, would lie for a moment quite bare and clear; then, at some high point, a mist would begin to form, would appear indeed to issue from the earth, as smoke from a subterranean fire, white smoke with pearly shadows; would thicken and spread out; would draw together and rise in an irregular spiral column, curling, swaying, poising, as if uncertain what to do next; and at last, all at once making up its mind, (how like a younker or a prodigal!), would go sailing away, straggling away, amorphous, on a puff of wind, leaving the hillside clear again;—­till, presently, the process would recommence da capo.