tes."

"Oh? The Servites--the Mantellate? I am glad of that," exclaimed Maria
Dolores. "It is a most beautiful order. They have an especial devotion
to Our Lady of Sorrows."

"Yes," said John, and remembered it was for Our Lady of Sorrows that she
who spoke was named.

Slow though their march had been, by this time they had come to the end
of the avenue, and were in the wide circular sweep before the castle.
They stopped here, and stood looking off over the garden, with its
sombre cypresses and bright beds of geranium, down upon the valley, dim
and luminous in a mist of gold. Great, heavy, fantastic-shaped clouds,
pearl-white with pearl-grey shadows, piled themselves up against the
scintillant dark blue of the sky. In and out among the rose-trees near
at hand, where the sun was hottest, heavily flew, with a loud
bourdonnement, the cockchafers promised by Annunziata,--big, blundering,
clumsy, the scorn of their light-winged and business-like competitors,
the bees. Lizards lay immobile as lizards cast in bronze, only their
little glittering, watchful pin-heads of eyes giving sign of life. And
of course the blackcaps never for a moment left off singing.

They stood side by side, within a yard of each other, in silent
contemplation of these things, during I don't know how many long and,
for John, delicious seconds. Yes, he owned it to himself; it was
delicious to feel her standing there beside him, in silent communion
with him, contemplating the same things, enjoying the same
pleasantnesses. Companionship--companionship: it was what he had been
unconsciously needing all along! ... At last she turned, and,
withdrawing her eyes lingeringly from the landscape, looked into his,
with a smile. She did not speak, but her smile said, just as explicitly
as her lips could have done, "What a scene of beauty!"

And John responded aloud, with fervour, "Indeed, indeed it is."

"And so romantic," she added. "It is like a scene out of some old high
musical romance."

"The most romantic scene I know," said he. "All my life I have thought
so."

"Oh?" said she, looking surprise. "Have you known it all your life?"

"Well,--very nearly," said he, with half a laugh. "I saw it first when I
was ten. Then for long years I lost it,--and only recovered it, by
accident, a month ago."

Her face showed her interest. "Oh? How was that? How did it happen?"

"When I was ten," John recounted, half laughing again, "I was travelling
with my fath