"It is very beautiful," was all her answer. She spoke it in so cheerless a tone that Antonio was concerned. "England is beautiful too," he said. "At first it is only natural you should be homesick." "Homesick?" she echoed, suddenly facing him with defiant eyes. "I'm not homesick. I don't know what it means. I don't know what Home means, either." Antonio was startled. Three or four speeches came to his tongue's tip, some of them inquisitive, all of them sympathetic. Finally he said: "Home is not built in a day. I myself was not bred and born in this part of Portugal. At first every face was strange. But it is home now. This torrent is the stream that runs through the kitchen of the abbey where I used to work. It is the brook that refreshes my little farm. Once it was no more to me than so many gallons of water. Now it talks and sings to me like a friend. Little by little you will learn to love this place." "I loved it as soon as I saw it," she retorted. "But I don't love it now. I loved it for about three hours." "Three hours? Why three hours?" "We arrived here about noon. We left about three. I loved it till we came to your house for dinner. Then..." Antonio waited anxiously. "Then," she continued, with a visible effort, "I ... longed with all my soul to be back in England. You said ... you remember what you said about our respecting this sacred place?" "I remember," said Antonio, his heart swelling with thankfulness. He had cudgelled his wits in vain for a way of introducing his plan; but here was the opportunity ready to his hand. "Well," she said, "we haven't come from England to respect this sacred place in the least. We have come to ruin and defile it. Those blue-and-white tile-pictures in the chapel are the most wonderful things I've ever seen; but we have come to tear them down. We have come to use the big rooms and long corridors for all sorts of experiments. We shall make them grimy with smoke and foul with fumes; and some fine day we shall have an accident and blow the whole place into the Atlantic, and ourselves with it." Her bitter and vehement fluency struck the monk dumb. "That isn't all," she added more bitterly than ever. "When they've fished us up out of the Atlantic and dressed our wounds we shall start making plans for a railway. We shall lose all our own money and make all the honest people in the district lose theirs too. But what will it matter? We shall get something for our gold and silver. We shall be honored with the company of the men who're going to make fortunes out of us and out of your country--men who don't know their own grandfathers. One of them will be kind enough to buy this domain from us for an old song and to build a fine square house out of the ruins. Senhor da Rocha, that is the way we are going to respect your sacred place." Antonio succeeded in meeting her defiant gaze with a show of calmness; but there was a tremor in his voice as he said: