Meanwhile I abode there with Luisina. I was in no haste to let her go.
Her presence pleased me in some subtle, quite indefinable manner; and my
sense of beauty, which, always strong, had hitherto lain dormant within me,
was awake at last and was finding nourishment in the graces of her.

I sat down upon the topmost of the terrace steps, and made her sit beside
me. This she did after some demur about the honour of it and her own
unworthiness, objections which I brushed peremptorily aside.

So we sat there on that May morning, quite close together, for which there
was, after all, no need, seeing that the steps were of a noble width. At
our feet spread the garden away down the flight of terraces to end in the
castle's grey, buttressed wall. But from where we sat we could look beyond
this, our glance meeting the landscape a mile or so away with the waters of
the Taro glittering in the sunshine, and the Apennines, all hazy, for an
ultimate background.

I took her hand, which she relinquished to me quite freely and frankly with
an innocence as great as my own; and I asked her who she was and how she
came to Mondolfo. It was then that I learnt that her name was Luisina,
that she was the daughter of one of the women employed in the castle
kitchen, who had brought her to help there a week ago from Borgo Taro,
where she had been living with an aunt.

To-day the notion of the Tyrant of Mondolfo sitting--almost coram populo--
on the steps of the garden of his castle, clasping the hand of the daughter
of one of his scullions, is grotesque and humiliating. At the time the
thought never presented itself to me at all, and had it done so it would
have troubled me no whit. She was my first glimpse of fresh young