aunt, allowed the girl to come into the garden whenever Allegre was
away. But Allegre's goings and comings were sudden and
unannounced; and that morning, Rita, crossing the narrow, thronged
street, had slipped in through the gateway in ignorance of
Allegre's return and unseen by the porter's wife.

"The child, she was but little more than that then, expressed her
regret of having perhaps got the kind porter's wife into trouble.

"The old woman said with a peculiar smile: 'Your face is not of
the sort that gets other people into trouble. My gentleman wasn't
angry. He says you may come in any morning you like.'

"Rita, without saying anything to this, crossed the street back
again to the warehouse full of oranges where she spent most of her
waking hours. Her dreaming, empty, idle, thoughtless, unperturbed
hours, she calls them. She crossed the street with a hole in her
stocking. She had a hole in her stocking not because her uncle and
aunt were poor (they had around them never less than eight thousand
oranges, mostly in cases) but because she was then careless and
untidy and totally unconscious of her personal appearance. She
told me herself that she was not even conscious then of her
personal existence. She was a mere adjunct in the twilight life of
her aunt, a Frenchwoman, and her uncle, the orange merchant, a
Basque peasant, to whom her other uncle, the great man of the
family, the priest of some parish in the hills near Tolosa, had
sent her up at the age of thirteen or thereabouts for safe keeping.
She is of peasant stock, you know. This is the true origin of the
'Girl in the Hat' and of the 'Byzantine Empress' which excited my
dear mother so much; of the mysterious girl that the privileged