n half an hour?"

"Yes--I've just time to run through these letters."

"Very well. _Au revoir!_ I'll be back at half-past two."

He went out, and Antonia joyfully pirouetted round the room before
settling to work--somewhat to the surprise of Barry, who entered at that
moment.

"Hallo, Miss Gibbs--practising the turkey-trot, or what?"

She stopped, blushing hotly, and tried in vain to look unconcerned.

"No, Mr. Raymond. Only--Mr. Rose wants me to motor down to Willowhurst
with him about some books--and it's such a lovely day!"

"You like motoring?" Barry could not resist a sympathetic smile.

"Oh, I just love it!" She clasped her hands in rapture. "Of course, I've
only been in taxis and char-a-bancs and things, but I've always wanted
to go in a real motor-car--a private one, I mean!"

"Have you never been in one?" Her childish confession made Barry feel
half pitiful, half dismayed.

"No, how should I?" She laughed, showing her pretty teeth
whole-heartedly. "You know girls in my position don't go about in
motors! Of course"--with one of her sudden changes of mood she paled and
spoke slowly--"if my father had lived things would have been different."

"You lived in Italy together?"

"Yes." She sank into a chair, and went on speaking dreamily,
her chin cradled in her hollowed hands. "We lived in a village not
far from Naples. Oh, how beautiful Italy is in the spring, when
the pink almond-blossom makes the hill-sides look like a great
rose-garden ... and the oranges and lemons flame out among the
dark-green leaves--and the roads are hot and white, and the blue
sea lies at the back of everything, sparkling in the sunshine...."

She paused, but Barry, fascinated by this revelation of a depth, almost
a poetry, in the nature he had thought shallow and commonplace, said
nothing; and after a second she continued.

"There was a steep hill behind our little house, and sometimes the sheep
that browsed there would stray ... so that the boy would sit and pipe to
them to come back. I used to watch him pipe, and make a garland of
vine-leaves and put it on his curls, and my father would laugh and call
him Pan, and say he was really thousands of years old ... and the sheep
would come up the slope looking so white against the green, and the air
would be full of the smell of the violets they crushed beneath their
feet...."

Again she paused, and this time Barry prompted her.

"And when he had found his flock, what did your