den looks rather dreary and empty, now that she has left,
doesn't it?" she asked. "Yet it looked jolly enough before her advent.
And see--the lizards (there are four of them, aren't there?) that
whisked away from the dial at her approach, have come back. Well, _your_
work's cut out. I suppose it wouldn't be possible for you to give a poor
woman a dish of tea?"

"I was on the very point of proposing it," said John. "May I conduct you
to my quarters?"

PART SECOND

I

Rather early next morning John was walking among the olives. He had gone
(straight from his bed, and in perhaps the least considered of toilets:
an old frieze ulster, ornamented with big buttons of mother-of-pearl, a
pair of Turkish slippers, a bathing-towel over his shoulder, and for
head-covering just his uncombed native thatch) he had gone for a swim,
some half a mile upstream, to a place he knew where the Rampio--the
madcap Rampio, all shallows and rapids--rests for a moment in a pool,
wide and deep, translucent, inviting, and, as you perceive when you have
made your plunge, of a most assertive chill. Now he was on his leisurely
way home, to the presbytery and what passed there for breakfast.

The hill-side rose from the river's bank in a series of irregular
terraces, upheld by rough stone walls. The gnarled old trees bent
towards each other and away like dwarfs and crook-backs dancing a
fantastic minuet; and in the grass beneath them, where the sun shot his
fiery darts and cast his net of shadows, Chloris had scattered
innumerable wildflowers: hyacinths, the colour of the sky; violets, that
threaded the air for yards about with their sentiment-provoking
fragrance; tulips, red and yellow; sometimes a tall, imperial iris; here
and there little white nodding companies of jonquils. Here and there,
too, the dusty-green reaches were pointed by the dark spire of a
cypress, alone, in a kind of glooming isolation; here and there a
blossoming peach or almond, gaily pink, sent an inexpressible little
thrill of gladness to one's heart. The air was sweetened by many
incense-breathing things besides the violets,--by moss and bark, the
dew-laden grass, the moist brown earth; and it was quick with music:
bees droned, leaves whispered, birds called, sang, gossiped, disputed,
and the Rampio played a crystal accompaniment.

John swung onwards at ease, while lizards, with tails that seemed
extravagantly long, fled from before his feet, terrible to them