it? for the great happiness seems likely to be mine
in having you with me. But the idea sprang into my mind."

"It is a good idea," said Vanno. "I should like it to come true. I have
a favour to ask you, and perhaps--who knows?--your granting it may
somehow bring the wish to pass."

A tiny figure of a woman--so old, so fragile as to look as if she were
made of transparent porcelain--appeared as he spoke from an arbour at
the far end of the little garden, an arbour whose grapevines hung
bannerlike over the precipice. She had a dish in her minute, wrinkled
hands, and was so surprised at sight of the tall young stranger that she
nearly dropped it.

"My little housekeeper," explained the cure. "She comes to me for a few
hours every day, to keep me fed and tidy; and she brings my meals here
to the arbour when the weather is fine; for I never tire of the view,
and it gives me an appetite that nothing else does."

"I see now why your letters have always been so happy," Vanno said, "and
why, when it was offered, you refused promotion in order to stay here."

"Oh, yes, I am very happy, thank Heaven, and I do my best to make others
so. God loves mirth. Dulness is of the devil! I love the place and the
people, and the people love me, I trust," the cure answered, with a
bright and curiously spiritual smile which transfigured the sunburned
face. "You have no idea, my Principino, of the thousand interests we
have here in this little mountain village. Once it was of great
importance. An English king came in the fourteenth century to visit the
Lascaris family at the castle. Those down below hardly know of its
existence, even those who come back year after year, but Roquebrune and
my garden are world enough for me. Is breakfast ready, Mademoiselle
Luciola? Thanks; we will begin as soon as you have brought things to lay
another place. Is that not a good name for the wee body--Firefly? Oh,
but you should see our fireflies here in May, when the Riviera is
supposed to be wiped off the map, not existent till winter. And the
glow-worms. I have three in my garden. No garden is complete without at
least one glow-worm. I had to beg my first from a neighbour."

"I should like to live up here, and be your neighbour, and cultivate
glow-worms," said Vanno, as his host guided him along a narrow path
which led between flower-beds to the arbour.

"Why not?" cried the priest, enraptured. "You could buy beautiful land,
a plateau of orange trees a