rs." Brother Dino looked at the Englishman with some expression
in his eyes which Brian did not remark at the moment, but which recurred
afterwards to his memory as being singular. There was sympathy in it,
pity, perhaps, and, above all, an intense curiosity. "Many years ago my
friends knew him; not I. The Signor Luttrell--he lives still in your
country?"

"No. He died eight years ago."

"And----"

A question evidently trembled on the Italian's lips, but he restrained
himself. He could not ask it when he saw the pain and the dread in
Brian's face. But Brian answered the question that he had meant to ask.

"My brother is dead, also. My mother is living and well."

Then he wheeled round and looked at the landing-stage, to which they
were now very close. The stranger respected his emotion; he glanced once
at the band of crape on Brian's arm, and then walked quietly away. When
he returned it was only to say good-bye.

"I should like to see you again," Brian said to him. "Perhaps I may find
you out and visit you some day. You find your life peaceful and happy,
no doubt?"

"Perfectly."

"I envy you," said Brian.

They parted. Brian went away to his hotel, leaving the young seminarist
still standing on the deck--a black figure with his pale hands crossed
upon his breast in the glow of the evening sunshine, awaiting the
arrival of his superior as a soldier waits for his commanding officer.
Brian looked back at him once and waved his hand: he had not been so
much interested in anyone for what seemed to him almost an eternity of
time.

Sitting sadly and alone in the hotel that night, he fell to pondering
over some of the words that the young Italian had spoken, and the
questions that he had asked. He wondered greatly what was the service
that his father had rendered to these Italians, and blamed himself a
little for not asking more about the young man's history. He knew well
enough that his parents had once spent two or three years
abroad--chiefly in Italy; he himself had been born in an Italian town,
and had spent almost the whole of the first year of his life in a little
village at the foot of the Apennines. Was it not near a place called San
Stefano, indeed, that he had been nursed by an Italian peasant woman?
Brian determined, in a vague and dreamy way, that at some future time he
would visit San Stefano, find out the history of his new acquaintance,
and see the place where he had been born at the same time. That