Italian ways.

"_Grazie_," said he, smiling. "You have been in Italy, Mr. Mallock?"

"Oh! I have been everywhere," I said, with a foolish idea of making him
respect me.

* * * * *

When they rode away at last, we all stood at the gate to watch them go.
The storm had cleared away wonderfully; and the air was fresh and
summerlike, and ten thousand jewels sparkled on the limes. They made a
very gallant cavalcade. The horses had recovered from their weariness,
for they were finely bred, all five of them; and the Duke's horse
especially was full of spirit, and curvetted a little, with pleasure and
the strength of our corn, as he went along. The servants' liveries too
were gay and pleasant to the eye:--(they were not the Duke's own
liveries; for when he went about outside town he used a plainer
sort)--and the Duke's dark blue, with his fair curls and his great hat
which he waved as he went, and my Lord Essex's spruce figure in his
buff, all made a very pretty picture as they went up the village street.

It was this, I think, and my Cousin Dolly's silence as she looked after
them, that determined me; and as we three went back again up the flagged
path to the house, and the servants round again to the yard, I spoke.

"Cousin Tom," I said. "Do you wish to know who our guests were?"

He looked at me in astonishment, and my Cousin Dolly too.

"Mr. Morton is the Duke of Monmouth," I said, "and Mr. Atkins, my Lord
Essex."

CHAPTER V

It was a long time before my Cousin Tom recovered from his astonishment
and his pleasure at having entertained such personages in his house. He
told me, of course, presently, when he had had time to think of it, that
he had guessed it all along, but had understood that His Grace wished to
be _incognito_; and I suppose at last he came to believe it. He would
fall suddenly musing in the evenings; and I would know what he was
thinking of; and it was piteously amusing to see, how one night again,
not long after, he rose and ran to the door when a drunken man knocked
upon it, and what ill words he gave him when he saw who it was. His was
a slow-moving mind; and I think he could not have formed the project,
which he afterwards carried out, while I was with him, or he must have
let it out to me.

* * * * *

It was a little piteous, too, to see with what avidity he seized upon
any news of the Duke, and how his natural inclinatio