dropped from my sleeve. "Eh, that's the story. I tell what I've heard. What
do I know?" He resumed his senile shuffle across the marble. "This is a bad
place to stay in--no one comes here. It's too cold. But the gentleman said,
_I must see everything_!"

I let the _lire_ sound. "So I must--and hear everything. This story,
now--from whom did you have it?"

His hand stole back. "One that saw it, by God!"

"That saw it?"

"My grandmother, then. I'm a very old man."

"Your grandmother? Your grandmother was--?"

"The Duchess's serving girl, with respect to you."

"Your grandmother? Two hundred years ago?"

"Is it too long ago? That's as God pleases. I am a very old man and she
was a very old woman when I was born. When she died she was as black as a
miraculous Virgin and her breath whistled like the wind in a keyhole. She
told me the story when I was a little boy. She told it to me out there in
the garden, on a bench by the fish-pond, one summer night of the year she
died. It must be true, for I can show you the very bench we sat on...."


III