In February came the Carnival; and pretty little rustic San Remo decked itself with bunting and greenery, and made believe to hold a Battle of Flowers, which had a certain village simplicity as compared with the serried ranks of carriages, the fashion, and beauty, and wealth of floral displays, along the Promenade des Anglais or the Croisette. With the Carnival came the mistral, which generally seems to be waiting round the corner ready to leap out upon the flower-throwers, to blight their bouquets, and blow dust into the eyes of beauty, and make the feeble health-seekers cower in the corners of their rose-decked carriages. This Lenten season was no exception to other seasons; and the calendar--which had been as it were in abeyance since New Year’s Day--came into force again--and stern and sterile Winter said, “Here am I. Did you think I had forgotten you?” The invalids were roughly awakened from their dream of Paradise, to discover that February even in San Remo meant February, and could not always be mistaken for May or June. Isola felt the change, though she was hardly conscious of it on the day of the floral battle, when she was sitting in a roomy landau, covered with the dark shining foliage and pale yellow fruit from some of those lemon trees in the orchard where she and Allegra had spent their morning hours. Allegra had planned the decorations, and had gone down to the coach-house to assist in the work, delighted to chatter with the coachman in doubtful Italian, groping her way in a language in which her whole stock-in-trade consisted of a few quotations from Dante or Petrarch--and all the wise saws of Dr. Riccabocca. “I would have none of that horrid pepper tree which pervades the place with its floppy foliage, and dull red fruit,” she told Isola, descanting on the result of her exertions. “I was rather taken with the pepper trees at first, but I am satiated with their languid grace. They are like the weeping ash or the weeping willow. There is no real beauty in them. I would rather have one of those cypresses towering up among the grey-green olives in the valley below Colla than all the pepper trees in the public gardens. I have used no flowers but narcissus; no colour but the pale gold of the lemons and the dark green of the leaves; except one bit of audacity which you will see presently.” This was at noon, after two hours’ work in the coach-house. An hour later the carriage was at the door.