d out like Pudding Jack, and, with
your ineffable simagrees, offering a strange woman flowers!"

If _she_ had only laughed, had only smiled, it wouldn't have been so
bad, it would have shown that she understood. "But through it all," he
writhed to recollect, "she was as solemn as a mourner. I suppose she was
shocked--perhaps she was frightened--very likely she took me for a
tramp. I wonder she didn't crown my beatitude by giving me her lira.
These foreigners do so lack certain discernments."

And with that rather an odd detail came back to him. _Was_ she a
foreigner? For it came vaguely back that he, impulsive and unthinking,
had spoken to her throughout in English. "And anyhow,"--this came
distinctly back,--"it was certainly in English that she thanked me."

III

What passed for breakfast at the presbytery was the usual Continental
evasion of that repast,--bread and coffee, despatched in your apartment.
But at noon the household met to dine.

The dining-room, on the ground floor, long and low, with a vaulted
ceiling, whitewashed, and a pavement of worn red tiles, was a clean,
bare room, that (pervaded by a curious, dry, not unpleasant odour)
seemed actually to smell of bareness, as well as of cleanliness. There
was a table, there was a dresser, there were a few unpainted deal
chairs, rush-bottomed (exactly like the chairs in the church, in all
Italian churches), and there was absolutely nothing else, save a great
black and white Crucifix attached to the wall. But, by way of
compensation, its windows opened southwards, flooding it with sunshine,
and commanding the wonderful perspective of the valley,--the blue-grey
hills, the snow-peaks, the blossoming low-lands, and the far-away
opalescence that you knew to be the lake.

At noon the parroco, his niece Annunziata, and his boarder met to dine.

The parroco was a short, stout, florid, black-haired, hawk-nosed,
fierce-looking, still youngish man, if five-and-forty may be reckoned
youngish, with a pair of thin lips and powerful jaws which, for purposes
of speech, he never opened if he could help it. Never,--till Sunday
came: when, mounting the pulpit, he opened them indeed, and his pent-up
utterance burst forth in a perfect torrent of a sermon, a wild gush of
words, shouted at the topmost stress of a remarkably lusty voice,
arresting for a minute or two by reason of the sheer physical energy it
represented, and then for a long half hour exquisitely tiresome.