John, always with magnificent assurance, put up his hand, to doff a man-of-the-worldy hat, and bow himself away;--and it encountered his bare locks, bare, and still wet from recent ducking. Whereupon, suddenly, the trifles he had forgotten were remembered, and at last (in the formula of the criminologist) "he realized his position:" hatless and uncombed, with the bathing-towel slung from his shoulder, in that weather-beaten old frieze coat with its ridiculous buttons, in those awful Turkish slippers,--offering, with his grand manner, flowers to a woman he didn't know, and smiling, to put her at her ease! His pink face burned to a livelier pink, his ears went hot, his heart went cold. The bow he finally accomplished was the blighted bud of the bow he had projected; and, as the earth didn't, of its charity, open and engulf him, he hastened as best he could, and with a painful sense of slinking, to remove his crestfallen person from her range of view. When these unselfconscious fellows are startled into selfconsciousness, I fancy they take it hard. I don't know how long it was before John had done heaping silent curses, silent but savage, upon himself; his luck, his "beastly officiousness," upon the whole afflicting incident: curses that he couldn't help diversifying now and then with a catch of splenetic laughter, as a vision of the figure he had cut would recurrently "--_flash upon that inward eye Which is the bliss of solitude_." "Oh, you _ape!_" he groaned. "Rigged out like Pudding Jack, and, with your ineffable simagrees, offering a strange woman flowers!" If _she_ had only laughed, had only smiled, it wouldn't have been so bad, it would have shown that she understood. "But through it all," he writhed to recollect, "she was as solemn as a mourner. I suppose she was shocked--perhaps she was frightened--very likely she took me for a tramp. I wonder she didn't crown my beatitude by giving me her lira. These foreigners do so lack certain discernments." And with that rather an odd detail came back to him. _Was_ she a foreigner? For it came vaguely back that he, impulsive and unthinking, had spoken to her throughout in English. "And anyhow,"--this came distinctly back,--"it was certainly in English that she thanked me." III What passed for breakfast at the presbytery was the usual Continental evasion of that repast,--bread and coffee, despatched in your apartment. But at noon the household met to dine.