ytery," she hospitably added,
"I will show you my tame kid."

"You are all that is most kind," responded the lady, and went off
smiling towards the castle.

Annunziata curled herself up in her old corner of the marble bench, and
appeared to relapse into profound thought.

V

A curious little intimate inward glow, a sense, somewhere deep down in
his consciousness, of elation and well-being, accompanied John all the
way to Roccadoro, mingling with and sweetening whatever thoughts or
perceptions occupied his immediate attention. This was a "soul-state"
that he knew of old, and he had no difficulty in referring it to its
cause. It was the glow and the elation which he was fortunate enough
always to experience when his eye had been fed with a fresh impression
of beauty; and he knew that he owed it to-day to the glimpse he had had,
in the cool light under the ilexes, of a slender figure in lilac and a
tiny figure in grey, beside a soft-complexioned old marble bench in the
midst of a shadowy, sunny, brown and green Italian garden.

The drive to Roccadoro from Sant' Alessina is a pleasant drive. The road
follows for the most part the windings of the Rampio, so that you are
seldom out of sight of its gleaming waters, and the brawl of it, now
louder, now less loud, is perpetually in your ears. To right and left
you have the tender pink of blossoming almonds, with sometimes the
scarlet flame of a pomegranate; and then the blue-grey hills, mantled in
a kind of transparent cloth-of-gold, a gauze of gold, woven of haze and
sunshine; and then, rosy white, with pale violet shadows, the
snow-peaks, cut like cameos upon the brilliant azure of the sky. And
sometimes, of course, you rattle through a village, with its crumbling,
stained, and faded yellow-stuccoed houses, its dazzling white canvas
awnings, its church and campanile, and its life that seems to pass
entirely in the street: men in their shirt sleeves, lounging, smoking,
spitting (else the land were not Italy!), or perhaps playing cards at a
table under the leafless bush of the wine-shop; women gossiping over
their needlework, or, gathered in sociable knots, combing and binding up
their sleek black hair; children sprawling in the kindly dirt; the
priest, biretta on head, nose in breviary, drifting slowly upon some
priestly errand, and "getting through his office;" and the immemorial
goatherd, bare-legged, in a tattered sugar-loaf hat, followed by his
flock, with the