roline is not telling the
truth."

"I don't assume--I know." said Mrs. Wilkins.

"And pray how do you know?" asked Mrs. Fisher icily, for Mrs.
Wilkins was actually helping herself to more maccaroni, offered her
officiously and unnecessarily a second time by Francesca.

"When I was out there just now I saw inside her."

Well, Mrs. Fisher wasn't going to say anything to that; she
wasn't going to trouble to reply to downright idiocy. Instead she
sharply rapped the little table-gong by her side, though there was
Francesca standing at the sideboard, and said, for she would wait no
longer for her next course, "Serve me."

And Francesca--it must have been wilful--offered her the
maccaroni again.

Chapter 10

There was no way of getting into or out of the top garden at San
Salvatore except through the two glass doors, unfortunately side by
side, of the dining-room and the hall. A person in the garden who
wished to escape unseen could not, for the person to be escaped from
could be met on the way. It was a small, oblong garden, and
concealment was impossible. What trees there were--the Judas tree, the
tamarisk, the umbrella-pine--grew close to the low parapets. Rose
bushes gave no real cover; one step to right or left of them, and the
person wishing to be private was discovered. Only the north-west
corner was a little place jutting out from the great wall, a kind of
excrescence or loop, no doubt used in the old distrustful days for
observation, where it was possible to sit really unseen, because
between it and the house was a thick clump of daphne.

Scrap, after glancing round to see that no one was looking, got
up and carried her chair into this place, stealing away as carefully on
tiptoe as those steal whose purpose is sin. There was another
excrescence on the walls just like it at the north-east corner, but
this, though the view from it was almost more beautiful, for from it
you could see the bay and the lovely mountains behind Mezzago, was
exposed. No bushes grew near it, nor had it any shade. The north-west
loop then was where she would sit, and she settled into it, and
nestling her head in her cushion and putting her feet comfortably on
the parapet, from whence they appeared to the villagers on the piazza
below as two white doves, thought that now indeed she would be safe.

Mrs. Fisher found her there, guided by the smell of her
cigarette. The incautious Scrap had not thought of that. Mrs. Fi