I hesitated a moment. "To make love to the niece."

"Ah," cried Mrs. Prest, "wait till you see her!"



II


"I must work the garden--I must work the garden," I said to myself,
five minutes later, as I waited, upstairs, in the long,
dusky sala, where the bare scagliola floor gleamed vaguely
in a chink of the closed shutters. The place was impressive
but it looked cold and cautious. Mrs. Prest had floated away,
giving me a rendezvous at the end of half an hour by some
neighboring water steps; and I had been let into the house,
after pulling the rusty bell wire, by a little red-headed,
white-faced maidservant, who was very young and not ugly and
wore clicking pattens and a shawl in the fashion of a hood.
She had not contented herself with opening the door from above
by the usual arrangement of a creaking pulley, though she
had looked down at me first from an upper window, dropping the
inevitable challenge which in Italy precedes the hospitable act.
As a general thing I was irritated by this survival of
medieval manners, though as I liked the old I suppose I ought
to have liked it; but I was so determined to be genial that I
took my false card out of my pocket and held it up to her,
smiling as if it were a magic token. It had the effect of
one indeed, for it brought her, as I say, all the way down.