as a conversation without words. They were getting to know each
other, they were breaking the ice. Each step they took was as good as a
spoken sentence, was a mutual experience, drawing them closer, helping
to an understanding. They walked slowly, as by a tacit agreement.

Silence, however, couldn't in the nature of things last for ever. It was
she who presently broke it.

"I owe you," she said, in her ivory voice, with her clean-cut
enunciation, "a debt of thanks." And still again she smiled, as she
looked over towards him, her dark eyes glowing, her dark hair richly
drooping, in the shadow of a big hat of wine-coloured straw.

John's eyes were at a loss. "Oh--?" he wondered.

"For a pleasure given me by our friend Annunziata," she explained. "This
morning she told me a most interesting parable about Death. And she
mentioned that it was you who had suggested to her to tell it me."

"Oh," said John, laughing, while the pink of his skin deepened a shade.
"She mentioned that, did she? I'm glad if you don't feel that I took a
good deal upon myself. But she had just told the same parable to me, and
it seemed a pity it shouldn't have a larger audience."

Then, after a few more paces taken again in silence, "What a marvellous
little person she is, Annunziata!" said Maria Dolores.

"She's to a marvellous degree the right product of her milieu," said
John.

Maria Dolores did not speak, but her eyes questioned, "Yes? How do you
mean?"

"I mean that she's a true child of the presbytery," he replied, "and at
the same time a true child of this Italy, where Paganism has never
perfectly died. She has been carefully instructed in her catechism, and
she has fed upon pious legends, she has breathed an ecclesiastical
atmosphere, until the things of the Church have become a part of her
very bone. She sees everything in relation to them, translates
everything in terms of them. But at the same time odd streaks of
Paganism survive in her. They survive a little--don't they?--in all
Italians. Wherever she goes her eye reads omens. She will cast your
fortune for you with olive-stones. The woods are peopled for her by
fauns and dryads. When she takes her walks abroad, I've no doubt, she
catches glimpses of Proteus rising from the lake, and hears old Triton
blow his wreathed horn."

Maria Dolores looked interested.

"Yes," she said, slowly, thoughtfully, and meditated for an interval.
By-and-by, "You know," she recommenced, "she's a