, no
doubt, as an army with banners, for his Turkish slippers, though not in
their pristine youth, were of scarlet leather embroidered in a rich
device with gold. And presently (an experience unusual at that hour in
the olive wood) he became aware of a human voice.

"Ohe! My good men, there! Will you be so kind as to gather me some of
those anemones? Here is a lira for your pains."

It was a feminine voice; it was youthful and melodious; it was finished,
polished, delicately modulated. And its inflection was at once confident
and gracious,--clearly the speaker took it for granted that she would
receive attention, and she implied her thanks abundantly beforehand. It
was a voice that evoked in the imagination a charming picture of fresh,
young, confident, and gracious womanhood.

"Hello!" said John to himself. "Who is there in this part of the world
with a voice like that?"

And he felt it would not be surprising if on glancing round he should
behold--as, in fact, he did--the stranger of yesterday, the Unknown of
the garden.

II

She stood on one of the higher terraces, (a very charming picture
indeed, bright and erect, in the warm shadow of the olives), and was
calling down to a couple of peasants at work on the other side of the
stream. Between the thumb and forefinger of an ungloved fair right hand,
she held up a silver lira.

Anemones, said she! Near to where the men were working, by the river's
brink, there was a space of level ground, perhaps a hundred feet long,
and tapering from half that breadth to a point. And this was simply
crimson and purple with a countless host of anemones.

She called to the men, and one seeing and hearing her would have thought
they must abandon everything, and spring to do her bidding. But they
didn't. Pausing only long enough to give her a phlegmatic stare, as if
in doubt whether conceivably she could have the impertinence to be
addressing _them_, and vouchsafing not a word, each went calmly on with
his employment;--very, very calmly, _piano_, _piano_, gently, languidly,
filling small baskets with fallen olives, and emptying them upon
outspread canvas sheets. There are, and more's the pity, two types of
Italian peasant. There's the old type, which we knew in our youth, and
happily it still survives in some numbers,--the peasant who, for all his
rags and tatters, has manners that will often put one's own to shame,
and, with a _simpatia_ like second-sight, is before one'