For a long while John's faculties were kept busy, trying to determine
whether that was a promise, a menace, or a mere word in the air.




III


"Rain before seven, clear before eleven," is as true, or as untrue, in
Lombardy as it is in other parts of the world. The rain had held up, and
now, in that spirited phrase of Corvo's, "here came my lord the Sun,"
splendidly putting the clouds to flight, or chaining them, transfigured,
to his chariot-wheels; clothing the high snow-peaks in a roseate glory,
(that seemed somehow, I don't know why, to accent their solitude and
their remoteness); flooding the valley with ethereal amber; turning the
swollen Rampio to a river of fire while the nearer hillsides, the olive
woods, the trees in the Castle garden, glistened with a million million
crystals, and the petals of the flowers were crystal-tipped; while the
breath of the earth rose in long streamers of luminous incense, and the
sky gleamed with every tender, every brilliant, tint of blue, from the
blue of pale forgetmenots to the blue of larkspur.

John, contemplating this spectacle, (and thinking of Maria Dolores?
revolving still her cryptic valediction?), all at once, as his eye
rested on the shimmer at the valley's end which he knew to be the lake,
lifted up his hand and clapped his brow. "By Jove," he muttered, "if I
wasn't within an ace of clean forgetting!" The sight of the lake had
fortunately put him in mind that he was engaged to-day to lunch with