ng idle all the evening. We have no book, and I lost my crochet at
Florence."

"Good. Miss Abbott, you are coming too?"

"It is very kind of you, Mr. Herriton. In some ways I should enjoy
it; but--excuse the suggestion--I don't think we ought to go to cheap
seats."

"Good gracious me!" cried Harriet, "I should never have thought of that.
As likely as not, we should have tried to save money and sat among the
most awful people. One keeps on forgetting this is Italy."

"Unfortunately I have no evening dress; and if the seats--"

"Oh, that'll be all right," said Philip, smiling at his timorous,
scrupulous women-kind. "We'll go as we are, and buy the best we can get.
Monteriano is not formal."

So this strenuous day of resolutions, plans, alarms, battles, victories,
defeats, truces, ended at the opera. Miss Abbott and Harriet were both
a little shame-faced. They thought of their friends at Sawston, who were
supposing them to be now tilting against the powers of evil. What would
Mrs. Herriton, or Irma, or the curates at the Back Kitchen say if they
could see the rescue party at a place of amusement on the very first day
of its mission? Philip, too, marvelled at his wish to go. He began
to see that he was enjoying his time in Monteriano, in spite of the
tiresomeness of his companions and the occasional contrariness of
himself.

He had been to this theatre many years before, on the occasion of a
performance of "La Zia di Carlo." Since then it had been thoroughly done
up, in the tints of the beet-root and the tomato, and was in many other
ways a credit to the little town. The orchestra had been enlarged,
some of the boxes had terra-cotta draperies, and over each box was now
suspended an enormous tablet, neatly framed, bearing upon it the number
of that box. There was also a drop-scene, representing a pink and purple
landscape, wherein sported many a lady lightly clad, and two more ladies
lay along the top of the proscenium to steady a large and pallid clock.
So rich and so appalling was the effect, that Philip could scarcely
suppress a cry. There is something majestic in the bad taste of Italy;
it is not the bad taste of a country which knows no better; it has not
the nervous vulgarity of England, or the blinded vulgarity of Germany.
It observes beauty, and chooses to pass it by. But it attains to
beauty's confidence. This tiny theatre of Monteriano spraddled and
swaggered with the best of them, and these ladies with the