And John took off his hat, a modish Panama, and bowed and smiled to her and to the lady. And one adept in reading the meaning of smiles might have read three or four separate meanings in that smile of his. It seemed to say to Annunziata, "Ah, you rogue! So already you have waylaid her, and made her acquaintance." To the lady: "I congratulate you upon your companion. Isn't she a diverting little monkey?" To himself: "And I congratulate _you_, my dear, upon being clothed and in your right mind, and upon having a proper hat to make your bow with." And to the universe at large "By Jove, she _is_ good-looking. Standing there before that marble bench, in the cool green light, under the great ilexes, with her lilac frock and her white sunshade, and Annunziata all in grey beside her,--what a subject for a painting, if only there were any painters who knew how to paint!" "He is going to a dinner at Roccadoro," said Annunziata, while John's back grew small and smaller in the distance. "Did you see, he had a portmanteau under the seat? He is going to a dinner of ceremony, and he will have his costume of ceremony in the portmaneau. I wonder what he will bring back with him for me. When he goes to Roccadoro he always brings something back for me. Last time it was a box of chocolate cigars. I should like to see him in his costume of ceremony. Wouldn't you?" But the lady merely laughed. And then, taking Annunziata's chin in her hand, she looked down into her big clear eyes, and said, "I must be off now, to join Signora Brandi. But I cannot leave without telling you how glad I am to have met you, and what pleasure I have derived from your conversation. I hope we shall meet often. Good-bye." "Good-bye, Signorina," said Annunziata, becoming formally polite again. "I shall always be at your service." And she dropped another courtesy. "If you will come to see me at the presbytery," she hospitably added, "I will show you my tame kid." "You are all that is most kind," responded the lady, and went off smiling towards the castle. Annunziata curled herself up in her old corner of the marble bench, and appeared to relapse into profound thought. V A curious little intimate inward glow, a sense, somewhere deep down in his consciousness, of elation and well-being, accompanied John all the way to Roccadoro, mingling with and sweetening whatever thoughts or perceptions occupied his immediate attention. This was a "soul-state" that he knew of old, and he had no difficulty in referring it to its cause. It was the glow and the elation which he was fortunate enough always to experience when his eye had been fed with a fresh impression of beauty; and he knew that he owed it to-day to the glimpse he had had, in the cool light under the ilexes, of a slender figure in lilac and a tiny figure in grey, beside a soft-complexioned old marble bench in the midst of a shadowy, sunny, brown and green Italian garden.