deeper into the
archway, while John's face fell, "I will bid you good-bye. I am to
report, then, that you decline my friend's invitation with thanks?"

"With my most grateful thanks," he was able intensively to rejoin, in
spite of his dismay at the imminence of her departure.

"And for a very special reason?" she harked back, now, suddenly, for
the first time since they had touched thin ice, giving him a glance.

It was the fleetingest of fleeting glances, it was merry and ironic, but
there was something in it which brought a flame to his blue eyes.

"For the very special reason," he answered, with vehemence, "that I fear
the presence near me of--" He held his breath for a second, the flame in
his eyes enveloping her; then, with an abrupt change of tone and mien,
he ended, "--of Frau Brandt might distract my attention from the
sermon."

She laughed, and said, "Good-bye."

"Good-bye," said John. And when she was halfway through the tunnel-like
passage, "I suppose you know you are leaving me to a day as barren as
the Desert of Sahara?" he called after her.

"Oh, who can tell what a day may bring forth?" called she, but without
looking back.

For a long while John's faculties were kept busy, trying to determine
whether that was a promise, a menace, or a mere word in the air.

III

"Rain before seven, clear before eleven," is as true, or as untrue, in
Lombardy as it is in other parts of the world. The rain had held up, and
now, in that spirited phrase of Corvo's, "here came my lord the Sun,"
splendidly putting the clouds to flight, or chaining them, transfigured,
to his chariot-wheels; clothing the high snow-peaks in a roseate glory,
(that seemed somehow, I don't know why, to accent their solitude and
their remoteness); flooding the valley with ethereal amber; turning the
swollen Rampio to a river of fire while the nearer hillsides, the olive
woods, the trees in the Castle garden, glistened with a million million
crystals, and the petals of the flowers were crystal-tipped; while the
breath of the earth rose in long streamers of luminous incense, and the
sky gleamed with every tender, every brilliant, tint of blue, from the
blue of pale forgetmenots to the blue of larkspur.

John, contemplating this spectacle, (and thinking of Maria Dolores?
revolving still her cryptic valediction?), all at once, as his eye
rested on the shimmer at the valley's end which he knew to be the lake,
lifted up his hand and cla