"Do you think her so remarkably pretty?" asked the spinster, following on a discussion in the drawing-room after luncheon, when the parsons had expressed their admiration of Vera's delicate beauty. "Far from it," answered the plethoric widow. "You may call her ethereal," which one of the parsons had done; "I call her half-starved. She has no complexion and no figure, and looks as if she had never had enough to eat." * * * * * It mattered little to Lady Felicia next day--after a quarter of an hour's grave conversation with Signor Provana, or to Vera, putting on her hat in the sunny little front room, and hearing the donkey's bells jingling in the garden below; it mattered really nothing to either grandmother or granddaughter what the world, as represented by the table d'hôte of the "Anglais," might think of them. Lady Felicia lay back among her pillows, smiling at the sea and the far-off hills as she had never smiled before; for, indeed, that lovely coast had taken a new colour under a new light--not the light that never was on sea or land, but the more mundane light of prosperity, a smiling future in which there should be no more the year in year out effort to keep up appearances upon inadequate means. And yet that smiling future depended upon a girl's whim, and at a word from Vera that cloud-built castle might vanish into thin air. "She could never be such an idiot as to refuse him," mused Grannie, disposed to be sanguine; "and, what is better, I believe she is really in love with him. After all, he is her first admirer, and that goes for a good deal. I was in love with an archbishop of seventy when I was fifteen; and I remember him now as quite the most delightful man I ever met." * * * * * Provana was walking about the garden, while the surest-footed donkey in San Marco shook his bells and pawed up the loose gravel with the forefoot of impatience, lazily watched by his owner, a sun-baked lad of nineteen. There were several pairs of eyes on the watch at various windows when Vera came tripping out in her neat blue riding-skirt and sailor hat. It was her kit for the riding-school near Bryanston Square, where Grannie had given her a season's lessons, lest she should grow up without the young lady's indispensable accomplishment of sitting straight on a horse, and going over a fence without swinging out of her saddle. She had brought a handful of sugar for the donkey, and he had to be fed and patted and talked about before Signor Provana was allowed to take the slender foot in his broad hand while she sprang lightly to the saddle; and then the little company moved away, Vera on her great grey donkey, bells jingling, red and blue tassels flying, Provana walking beside her, and the sunburnt youth at the donkey's head, ready to hold the bridle when they came to the narrow hill-tracks.