"Yes, good cooking has become a _sine qua non_ with me," Dennison answered. "I don't take much, but it must be just so; I can't put up with even a trifling deficiency. I give Peppino very high wages for this economical land; but, on my side, I require of him unfailingly his very best skill. I am afraid," he added, with a quizzical smile, "that I couldn't get through my day and cultivate lofty thoughts if I did not feel certain that at the end of it there would be a capital little dinner waiting on the table. Physical comfort has become enormously important to me. Result: I'm corpulent!" "Oh no," said Gray. "Well on the way to it, then. Do you remember how lean I used to be?" "You look in much better trim than you did when--" "When I was young. You needn't hesitate about saying it; we're in the same box in that respect. How old do we call ourselves now?" "We're fifty-two," answered Gray. "But I to-day look fifty-eight or nine, and you about forty. To me, Jack, it's marvellous--your youth." "Yes, I'm plump. I no longer worry; I take life easily. But it's such an immense change in every way that I've stopped watching it myself. Why, I remember when I liked pictures that tell a story, good heavens! and books with a moral, and iron-fronted blocks, and plenty of gaslight." "Well, it's awfully tempting," said Gray, slowly, as he looked about him. "Plenty of gaslight?" "No; this place--the whole thing." [Illustration: TEA IN THE GARDEN] They were sitting at one end of a flower-bordered walk which leads to a terrace with a parapet; from here opens out a panorama of the velvety hills of Tuscany, with a crowd of serried mountain-peaks rising behind them; below, in the narrow valley of a winding stream, is the small mediæval town of Tre Ponti, or Three Bridges. The garden retains a distinctly monastic air, though its last monk took leave of it several hundred years ago; here are no statues of goddesses and muses, so common in Italy; instead there are two worn stone crosses, with illegible Latin inscriptions at their bases. An arcade along one side is paved with flag-stones, and has the air of a cloister; at its end is a fresco representing a monk with his finger on his lips, as if inculcating silence; the face is dim, all save the eyes, but these have a strange vitality, and appear to follow the gazer with intelligence as he turns away. There are two ancient sundials, and there is a relic which excites curiosity--a flight of stone steps attached to a high boundary wall; the steps go up for a distance of eight or nine feet, and then stop, leading to nothing. On the north and west, where it stretches to the verge of the hill, the garden is open, defended only by its parapet. Across its south edge it is shut in by the irregular stone house called Casa Colombina. On the east there is the boundary wall already mentioned, and above this wall there rises outside, not fifteen yards away, a massive