about her. Sometimes, when I look at her, I can almost see her wings.
What will be her future, if she grows up? One would rather not think of
her as married to some poor Italian, and having to give herself to the
prosaic sort of existence that would mean."

"The sordid sort of existence," augmented John. "No, one would decidedly
rather not. But she will never marry. She will enter religion. Her
uncle has it all planned out. He destines her for the Servites."

"Oh? The Servites--the Mantellate? I am glad of that," exclaimed Maria
Dolores. "It is a most beautiful order. They have an especial devotion
to Our Lady of Sorrows."

"Yes," said John, and remembered it was for Our Lady of Sorrows that she
who spoke was named.

Slow though their march had been, by this time they had come to the end
of the avenue, and were in the wide circular sweep before the castle.
They stopped here, and stood looking off over the garden, with its
sombre cypresses and bright beds of geranium, down upon the valley, dim
and luminous in a mist of gold. Great, heavy, fantastic-shaped clouds,
pearl-white with pearl-grey shadows, piled themselves up against the
scintillant dark blue of the sky. In and out among the rose-trees near
at hand, where the sun was hottest, heavily flew, with a loud
bourdonnement, the cockchafers promised by Annunziata,--big, blundering,
clumsy, the scorn of their light-winged and business-like competitors,
the bees. Lizards lay immobile as lizards cast in bronze, only their
little glittering, watchful pin-heads of eyes giving sign of life. And
of course the blackcaps never for a moment left off singing.