conversation. I hope we shall meet often. Good-bye."

"Good-bye, Signorina," said Annunziata, becoming formally polite again.
"I shall always be at your service." And she dropped another courtesy.
"If you will come to see me at the presbytery," she hospitably added,
"I will show you my tame kid."

"You are all that is most kind," responded the lady, and went off
smiling towards the castle.

Annunziata curled herself up in her old corner of the marble bench, and
appeared to relapse into profound thought.




V


A curious little intimate inward glow, a sense, somewhere deep down in
his consciousness, of elation and well-being, accompanied John all the
way to Roccadoro, mingling with and sweetening whatever thoughts or
perceptions occupied his immediate attention. This was a "soul-state"
that he knew of old, and he had no difficulty in referring it to its
cause. It was the glow and the elation which he was fortunate enough
always to experience when his eye had been fed with a fresh impression
of beauty; and he knew that he owed it to-day to the glimpse he had had,
in the cool light under the ilexes, of a slender figure in lilac and a
tiny figure in grey, beside a soft-complexioned old marble bench in the
midst of a shadowy, sunny, brown and green Italian garden.