hair, and wondering blue eyes were quite a feature of the place.
Overhead, fluttering flags and wreaths of flowers, and bunting, and
brightly tinted paper festoons--an orgy of colour, in honour of the
saint's festival on the morrow.

The Duchess, attired in black, with a black and white sunshade, and a
string of preposterous amethysts nestling in the imitation Val of her
bosom, was leaning on the arm of an absurdly good-looking youth whom
she addressed as Denis. Everyone called him Denis or Mr. Denis. People
used his surname as little as possible. It was Phipps.

With a smile for everyone, she moved more deliberately than the rest,
and used her fan rather more frequently. She knew that the sirocco was
making stealthy inroads upon her carefully powdered cheeks; she wanted
to look her best on the arrival of Don Francesco, who was to bring some
important message from the clerical authorities of the mainland anent
her forthcoming reception into the Roman Catholic Church. He was her
friend. Soon he would be her confessor.

Wordly-wise, indolent, good-natured and, like most Southerners, a
thorough-going pagan, Don Francesco was deservedly popular as
ecclesiastic. Women adored him; he adored women. He passed for an
unrivalled preacher; his golden eloquence made converts everywhere,
greatly to the annoyance of the parroco, the parish priest, who was
doubtless sounder on the Trinity but a shocking bad orator and
altogether deficient in humanity, and who nearly had a fit, they said,
when the other was created Monsignor. Don Francesco was a fisher of
men, and of women. He fished AD MAIOREM DEI GLORIAM, and for the fun of
the thing. It was his way of taking exercise, he once confessed to his
friend Keith; he was too fat to run about like other people--he could