These two people were not entirely strangers to each other. Fifteen years before they had spent a summer together in an old farm-house far away beyond where the sun would set this evening behind old Roman Baiæ. That farm-house was wonderfully picturesque, although picturesqueness had been none of its original builder's intention. It had been a sort of manor-house, built by a blond and robust English family in memory of the Elizabethan mansion in which, father and son and son's son, they had thriven and decayed across the sea. Generations had come and gone since then. The Tudor gables and overhanging stories, like the Tudor nose in Westminster Abbey, had felt the tooth of time. The nose is imperious still, although its royal end is broken off, and it points heavenward with its regal pride not in the least abated with its proportions. Unlike the Tudor nose, the Tudor gables had weakened, and sunk and bulged in all sorts of picturesquely-pusillanimous lines and curves under a soft veil of moss. The house had become a medley of quaint humps and protuberances, huddled together without rhyme or reason by the taste or needs of each succeeding heir. But, flooded and dashed with blooming, radiant neglect, throttled with many-fingered vines, the gray centre of a rainbow of wild brier, syringa, hollyhocks and sunflowers, it was a delight to artistic eyes. "It's only 'cos pa's enjoyed such pore health for long back, and we bein' all girls, that the ole place looks so like creation," would always say one of the "girls," thus apologetic of the dilapidation and decay which were the chief means of the family's support. For never an artist passed that way that he did not stay his steps and beg to be sheltered by that quaint old roof for at least a day or two. And when, gone hence, the strolling artist would sing of the idyllic nook he had found in a crescent of hills by the sea, where heaven came down to earth and board was but two dollars a week, others of his kind would be sure to be lured by echo of his strain to the same spot. Thus every summer for three years the house had been full of boarders. Its owners gained thus the means to live during all the year, and also were able to secure a reservoir of gossip and tittle-tattle from which to draw refreshing streams during all the arid days between October's late dahlias and the earliest roses of June.