It was a feminine voice; it was youthful and melodious; it was finished,
polished, delicately modulated. And its inflection was at once confident
and gracious,--clearly the speaker took it for granted that she would
receive attention, and she implied her thanks abundantly beforehand. It
was a voice that evoked in the imagination a charming picture of fresh,
young, confident, and gracious womanhood.

"Hello!" said John to himself. "Who is there in this part of the world
with a voice like that?"

And he felt it would not be surprising if on glancing round he should
behold--as, in fact, he did--the stranger of yesterday, the Unknown of
the garden.




II


She stood on one of the higher terraces, (a very charming picture
indeed, bright and erect, in the warm shadow of the olives), and was
calling down to a couple of peasants at work on the other side of the
stream. Between the thumb and forefinger of an ungloved fair right hand,
she held up a silver lira.

Anemones, said she! Near to where the men were working, by the river's
brink, there was a space of level ground, perhaps a hundred feet long,
and tapering from half that breadth to a point. And this was simply
crimson and purple with a countless host of anemones.