time, her heart towards all humanity and in particular, on this occasion, towards the rest of the saintly band; were they not her brothers and sisters?  She even knitted six pairs of warm woollen socks and sent them with a polite message to the Master—­a message which was left unanswered, though the socks were never returned.  As to Peter—­she called him her Little Peter or, in his more expansive moments, Peter the Great.  Soon he was always coming to the villa at meal-times and staying for hours afterwards, while they wrestled with the complexities of Russian genders.  He made no secret of the pleasure he derived from filling his healthy young stomach at her expense; everything supplementary to that prime condition he took as a gift from the gods.  If he had not been so simple-minded he could have wheedled any amount of money out of her.  The affair had now been going on for four month—­quite a long while, as such affairs went.

Not for the first time did Madame Steynlin experience the drawbacks of her house, as regards natural situation.  It was, as Don Francesco often pointed out, “the most unstrategic villa on Nepenthe.”  Ah, that peninsula, that isthmus, or whatever you called the thing—­what on earth had attracted her to the place?  What demon had tempted her to buy it?  How she envied the other people—­Keith, for example, who, if he had been a man of that kind, could have allowed any visitor, in the broadest daylight, to creep in or out of his mouldy old gateway in the wall without a soul being any the wiser!  High-priced horticultural experts had been consulted as to the best means of thickening the vegetation and screening the approaches to the house.  They had met with scanty success.  The soil was of the most sterile, intractable rock; those few wind-blown olives were dreadfully diaphanous, and Peter’s blouse visible from afar—­even from the market-place.  Everything got about on Nepenthe.  People began to twit her about the progress of those “Russian lessons.”  It became quite a scandal.  Signor Malipizzo was more annoyed than any one else.  He hated the whole brood of Russians, and had formed various projects for uprooting the association from the island.  His friend the Commissioner thoroughly endorsed these views.  Often he declared that something must be done about it.

The Master, despite his seclusion, had heard of the affair.  He was grieved, but not unduly so; he had other disciples to choose from.  Every new arrival from Holy Russia, regardless of sex or age, spent some hours or days, as the case might be, alone with the Master in his apartment, in order to be initiated into the Law and impregnated with its full signification:  such was the way of the New Jerusalem.  By this system of spiritual control he could be sure of finding a successor sooner or later.  Besides, the defection of this favourite disciple was only a drop in the ocean of his griefs.  What secretly preyed upon his mind was that, on the verge of returning to his