The name of this good man was Bavarello—­Giacomo Bavarello—­and he lived with his wife Battestina in a house full of lean children and live-stock.  The house had deep overhanging eaves, held down by cords and weighted with rocks; but this must have been rather in deference to the custom of the country than as a precaution against storms, for the farmstead lay cosily in a dingle of the mountain, where storms never reached it.  Yet it took the sun from earliest dawn almost to the last beam of midsummer daylight.  Behind it a pine forest climbed to the snow; and up and across the snow a corniced path traversed the face of the mountain and joined the diligence-road a little below the summit of the pass.  At the point of junction stood a small chapel, with a dwelling-room attached, where lived a brother from the Benedictine hospice on the far side of the pass.  His name was Brother Polifilo, and it was supposed that he had fallen in love with solitude (else how could he have endured to live in such a place?); yet his smile justified his name, and his manner of playing with the children when he descended to bring us the consolations of religion—­ which he did by arrangement with the infirm parish priest in the valley.  Also, on fine mornings when the snow held and the little ones could be trusted along the path, the entire household of the Bavarelli would troop up to Mass in his tiny chapel.

For me, it was many weeks before my sick brain allowed me to climb beyond the pines; and many weeks, though the Princess always went with me—­before she told me all the story of what had happened in Genoa.  Yet we talked much, at one time and another, though we were silent more; for the silences told more.  Only our talk and our silences were always of the present.  It was understood that the whole story of the past would come, some day, when I had strength for it.  Of the future we never spoke.  I could not then have told why; though now all too well I can.

Sick man though I was, bliss filled those days for me, and their memory is steeped in bliss.  Yet a thought began, after a while, to trouble me.  We were living on these poor Bavarelli, and, for aught I knew, paying them not a penny.  The good farmer might be grateful to his priest-brother down yonder; but even if his gratitude were inexhaustible we—­strangers as we were—­ought not to test it so.  To be sure, he and his wife wore a smile for us, morning and evening—­and this, though I had a notion that Donna Battestina was of a saving disposition.  I had heard the pair of them protest when the Princess offered to make herself useful in the farm-work—­for which she was plainly unfit—­or, failing that, in the housework.  They had made up their minds about us, that we were persons of gentle blood, to whom all work must be derogatory.

The next day I insisted on climbing the slope to the pine-wood without support of her arm.

“It is time,” said I, “that I grew strong; unless somewhere you are hiding a fairy purse.”