John and Annunziata, seated together on a marble bench in the shelter of the great cloister, with its faded frescoes, at the north-eastern extremity of the castle buildings, had been watching this element-play for some minutes in silence.  But by-and-by Annunziata spoke.

“What makes the cloud come out of the hill like that?” she asked, her eyes anxiously questioning his.  “I have seen it happen many times, but I could never understand it.  There cannot be a fire underneath?”

“If you can’t understand it, Mistress Wisdom,” responded John, smiling on her, “you surely mustn’t expect a featherpate like me to.  Between ourselves, I don’t believe any one can really understand it, though there’s a variety of the human species called scientists who might pretend they could.  It’s all a part of that great scheme of miracles by which God’s world goes on, Nature, which nobody can really understand in the very least.  All that the chaps called scientists can really do is to observe and more or less give names to the miracles.  They can’t explain ’em.”

“It is great pleasure to watch such things,” said Annunziata.  “It is a great blessing to be allowed to see a miracle performed with your own eyes.”

“So it is,” agreed John.  “And if you keep your eyes well open, there’s not a minute of the livelong day when you mayn’t see one.”

“It is very strange,” said Annunziata, “but when the sun shines, then I love the sunny weather, and am glad that it does not rain.  Yet when it does rain, then I find that I love the rain too, that I love it just as much as the sun,—­it is so fresh, it smells so good, the raindrops are so pretty, and they make such a pretty sound where they fall, and the grey light is so pleasant.”

“Our loves,” said John, “are always very strange.  Love is the rummest miracle of them all.  It is even more difficult to account for than the formation of clouds on the hillside.”

“We love the things that give us pleasure,” said Annunziata.

“And the people, sometimes, who give us pain,” said John.

“We love the people, first of all, who are related to us,” said Annunziata, “and then the people we see a great deal of—­just as I love, first of all, my uncle, and then you and Marcella the cook.”

“Who brings in the inevitable veal,” said John.  “Thank you, Honeymouth.”  He bowed and laughed, while Annunziata’s grave eyes wondered what he was laughing at.  “But it isn’t every one,” he pointed out, “who has your solid and well-balanced little head-piece.  It isn’t every one who keeps his love so neatly docketed, or so sanely submitted to the sway of reason.  Some of us love first of all people who aren’t related to us in the remotest degree, and people we’ve seen hardly anything of and know next to nothing about.”

Annunziata deprecatingly shook her head.

“It is foolish to love people we know nothing about,” she declared, in her deep voice, and looked a very sage delivering judgment.