"The garden looks rather dreary and empty, now that she has left,
doesn't it?" she asked. "Yet it looked jolly enough before her advent.
And see--the lizards (there are four of them, aren't there?) that
whisked away from the dial at her approach, have come back. Well, _your_
work's cut out. I suppose it wouldn't be possible for you to give a poor
woman a dish of tea?"

"I was on the very point of proposing it," said John. "May I conduct you
to my quarters?"




PART SECOND




I


Rather early next morning John was walking among the olives. He had gone
(straight from his bed, and in perhaps the least considered of toilets:
an old frieze ulster, ornamented with big buttons of mother-of-pearl, a
pair of Turkish slippers, a bathing-towel over his shoulder, and for
head-covering just his uncombed native thatch) he had gone for a swim,
some half a mile upstream, to a place he knew where the Rampio--the
madcap Rampio, all shallows and rapids--rests for a moment in a pool,
wide and deep, translucent, inviting, and, as you perceive when you have
made your plunge, of a most assertive chill. Now he was on his leisurely