"Hallo, Miss Gibbs--practising the turkey-trot, or what?" She stopped, blushing hotly, and tried in vain to look unconcerned. "No, Mr. Raymond. Only--Mr. Rose wants me to motor down to Willowhurst with him about some books--and it's such a lovely day!" "You like motoring?" Barry could not resist a sympathetic smile. "Oh, I just love it!" She clasped her hands in rapture. "Of course, I've only been in taxis and char-a-bancs and things, but I've always wanted to go in a real motor-car--a private one, I mean!" "Have you never been in one?" Her childish confession made Barry feel half pitiful, half dismayed. "No, how should I?" She laughed, showing her pretty teeth whole-heartedly. "You know girls in my position don't go about in motors! Of course"--with one of her sudden changes of mood she paled and spoke slowly--"if my father had lived things would have been different." "You lived in Italy together?" "Yes." She sank into a chair, and went on speaking dreamily, her chin cradled in her hollowed hands. "We lived in a village not far from Naples. Oh, how beautiful Italy is in the spring, when the pink almond-blossom makes the hill-sides look like a great rose-garden ... and the oranges and lemons flame out among the dark-green leaves--and the roads are hot and white, and the blue sea lies at the back of everything, sparkling in the sunshine...." She paused, but Barry, fascinated by this revelation of a depth, almost a poetry, in the nature he had thought shallow and commonplace, said nothing; and after a second she continued. "There was a steep hill behind our little house, and sometimes the sheep that browsed there would stray ... so that the boy would sit and pipe to them to come back. I used to watch him pipe, and make a garland of vine-leaves and put it on his curls, and my father would laugh and call him Pan, and say he was really thousands of years old ... and the sheep would come up the slope looking so white against the green, and the air would be full of the smell of the violets they crushed beneath their feet...." Again she paused, and this time Barry prompted her. "And when he had found his flock, what did your boy-Pan do then?" "Then he would drive them away over the hill-side, and we would hear his pipe growing fainter and fainter in the distance, until it died away altogether...." She sprang up suddenly. "Oh, Mr. Raymond, what nonsense I'm talking! That life's over and done with, and I've all these letters to copy!" "All right--I won't interrupt!" He took up some papers. "But just tell me this. Do you ever want to go back to Italy?" She hesitated, considering. "No, I think not," she said at last. "You see, it would all be different. My father wouldn't be there, nor the Padre--and even old Fiammetta may be dead by now." "But the place would be the same--the sea as blue!"