And Miss Carroll was so displeased with the scene within that she consented to withdraw to the scene without; and there they remained as long as the singing lasted. They walked up and down the broad piazza; he talked about the mountain scenery, and the waterfalls. She did not appear to be much interested in them. Her companion, however, was not so much chilled by this manner of hers as he had sometimes been; he had had a glimpse behind it. CHAPTER V. Early in the week following the reception, Frederick Owen learned that Dupont was about to take his departure from Far Edgerley, and with no expectation of returning. This was good news. He was beginning to have the feeling that the fellow would never go away, that he and his guitar would become a permanent feature of Madam Carroll's receptions, his lounging figure under the cream-colored umbrella a daily ornament of the centre of Edgerley Street. Was he really, then, going? It seemed too good to be true. But the tidings had been brought by Miss Dalley, who was both good and true, and who was accurate as well; she had the very hour--"On Friday, at nine." "Hangman's day!" thought Owen, with satisfaction, doing his thinking this time with the remnants of boyhood feelings; for though he was in his third decade--the beginning of it--and a clergyman, the boy in him was by no means entirely outgrown. Miss Dalley had come to return a book, Longfellow's "Outre Mer," and to borrow anything he might have about Ferrara. "I was so much interested in our American poet's description of the Italian poet's grave, on the Janiculum," she said. "It was such a touching passage, and it contained this truly poetical sentence: 'He sleeps midway between his cradle at Sorrento and his dungeon at Ferrara.' I can never go in _person_, Mr. Owen; Fate has denied me that. But I can think of the inscription, which Longfellow gives: 'Torquati Tasso ossa hic jacet,' and be there in _mind_." She had called it "hic jacket." "Jacent, I think," said the rector, gently. "Yes, certainly; that is what I meant--jacinth," said Miss Dalley, correcting herself. "A beautiful word, is it not? And so appropriate, too, for a poet's grave, mentioned, as it is, in Revelations!" On Friday Dupont really did go. The rector himself saw him pass in the high red wagon of the Washington Inn on his way down the mountain to the lower town, the eastward-bound stage, and thence--wherever he pleased, the gazer thought, so long as he did not return. But although the rector gave this vagueness to the musician's destination, it was understood in other quarters that he was going back to the West India Islands--"where he used to live, you know." "Upon which one did he live?" asked the junior warden. "There are about fifty thousand of them, large and small; he can't have lived on them all." "For my part, I think him _quite_ capable of it," answered Miss Honoria, grimly.