he let them go away into the night with
no clamour at all. This, they could not help thinking, was a bad sign.
He asked for nothing because presently he was to get so much.

They came to some steps. The road ended abruptly in a church and
some descending steps. The man held the lantern low for them to see
the steps.

"San Salvatore?" said Mrs. Wilkins once again, very faintly,
before committing herself to the steps. It was useless to mention it
now, of course, but she could not go down steps in complete silence.
No mediaeval castle, she was sure, was ever built at the bottom of
steps.

Again, however, came the echoing shout--"Si, si--San Salvatore."

They descended gingerly, holding up their skirts just as if they
would be wanting them another time and had not in all probability
finished with skirts for ever.

The steps ended in a steeply sloping path with flat stone slabs
down the middle. They slipped a good deal on these wet slabs, and the
man with the lantern, talking loud and quickly, held them up. His way
of holding them up was polite.

"Perhaps," said Mrs. Wilkins in a low voice to Mrs. Arbuthnot,
"It is all right after all."

"We're in God's hands," said Mrs. Arbuthnot again; and again Mrs.
Wilkins was afraid.

They reached the bottom of the sloping path, and the light of the
lantern flickered over an open space with houses round three sides.
The sea was the fourth side, lazily washing backwards and forwards on
pebbles.

"San Salvatore," said the man pointing with his lantern to a
black mass curved round the water like an arm flung about it.

They strained their eyes. They saw the black mass, and on the
top of it a light.

"San Salvatore?" they both repeated incredulously, for where were
the suit-cases, and why had they been forced to get out of the fly?

"Si, si--San Salvatore."

They went along what seemed to be a quay, right on the edge of
the water. There was not even a low wall here--nothing to prevent the
man with the lantern tipping them in if he wanted to. He did not,
however, tip them in. Perhaps it was all right after all, Mrs. Wilkins
again suggested to Mrs. Arbuthnot on noticing this, who this time was
herself beginning to think that it might be, and said no more about
God's hands.

The flicker of the lantern danced along, reflected in the wet
pavement of the quay. Out to the left, in the darkness and evidently
at the end of a jetty, was a red light. They came to an ar