"I don't think it need," he said. "Her delicacy, her frailness, have never struck me as indicating weakness,--they seem simply the proper physical accompaniments of her crystalline little soul,--she's made of a fine and delicate clay. She thinks about Death, it is true, but not in a morbid way,--and that's a part of her ecclesiastical tradition; and she thinks quite as much about life,--she thinks about everything. I agree with you, it's a pity she has no other children. But she isn't by any means deficient in the instincts of childhood. She can enjoy a chocolate cigar, for instance, as well as another; and as for marchpane, I have her own word that she adores it." Maria Dolores gave another light trill of laughter. "Yes, I'm aware of her passion for marchpane. She confided it to me this morning. And as, in reply to her questions, I admitted that I rather liked it myself, she very generously offered to bring me some this afternoon,--which, to be sure, an hour ago, she did." She laughed again, and John laughed too. "All the same" she insisted, "I can't help that feeling of uneasiness about her. Sometimes, when I look at her, I can almost see her wings. What will be her future, if she grows up? One would rather not think of her as married to some poor Italian, and having to give herself to the prosaic sort of existence that would mean." "The sordid sort of existence," augmented John. "No, one would decidedly rather not. But she will never marry. She will enter religion. Her uncle has it all planned out. He destines her for the Servites." "Oh? The Servites--the Mantellate? I am glad of that," exclaimed Maria Dolores. "It is a most beautiful order. They have an especial devotion to Our Lady of Sorrows." "Yes," said John, and remembered it was for Our Lady of Sorrows that she who spoke was named. Slow though their march had been, by this time they had come to the end of the avenue, and were in the wide circular sweep before the castle. They stopped here, and stood looking off over the garden, with its sombre cypresses and bright beds of geranium, down upon the valley, dim and luminous in a mist of gold. Great, heavy, fantastic-shaped clouds, pearl-white with pearl-grey shadows, piled themselves up against the scintillant dark blue of the sky. In and out among the rose-trees near at hand, where the sun was hottest, heavily flew, with a loud bourdonnement, the cockchafers promised by Annunziata,--big, blundering, clumsy, the scorn of their light-winged and business-like competitors, the bees. Lizards lay immobile as lizards cast in bronze, only their little glittering, watchful pin-heads of eyes giving sign of life. And of course the blackcaps never for a moment left off singing.