Poor, frightened Ermengarde gasped a little, for it is one thing to be the object of a boy's distant, poetic homage and quite another to be raved at by a demented and exacting person, who describes himself as a tiger and his feelings as ferocious. She looked aimlessly over the lemons and olives to the deep dark blueness that glowed to a firm and rounded intensity against a pale sky, quite unable to put two words together, while M. Isidore, his eyes full of soft, inward light, and his features calm and composed as a sleeping babe's, looked as if nothing could disturb the sunny peace of his soul, and composedly suggested that they should continue to follow the melancholy experiences of "this poor M. Pellico," with which intention he took a seat at her side, and, placing the open book on the table between and before them, began to read aloud to ears confused with terror and remorse. At this juncture the approach of Heinrich, the porter, not yet in his smart gold and green livery, but green-baize-aproned and shirt-sleeved, as his morning duties required, and with a curious smile in his great, soft, dark eyes, put a final stop to the Italian lesson by conveying a summons to the teacher to transact some homely business in those obscure back premises whither no visitor ever penetrated. "Peste!" cried the impassioned lover, with darkening brows. "Zese dampt duties," he added in English, with a little shrug and a sunny smile, to the still pale and terrified Mrs. Allonby. "Our poor lesson! Madame excuses? Yes? _A rivederla!_" and with a bow and smile he was gone, and Ermengarde began to breathe more freely. She looked at the monastery sitting on the wooded hill, at the velvety blue above it, the peacock blue below, at the violet-veined mountain peaks around; she watched great bees and hawk-moths plunging into the petals of stocks, and butterflies fluttering above the heads of people reading and basking in the blue and golden morning, drawing long breaths and wondering why everything seemed vaguely to accuse her. She turned to the towered village throned and shadowy beneath the eastern peak, and that, too, seemed to despise her. She felt unworthy of the very flower scents. Yet she had done nothing, and had meant so well. Could any reasonable being have foreseen this? Who, stroking the soft fur of some gamesome fireside pet, could expect the growl and clawing of a full-sized tiger? Oh, for a good, full-flavoured, suffocating mouthful of London fog, for firelight dancing on china and polished surface in the murky noonday at home, instead of this perpetual, unnatural, homeless glare! She went into the house, and, remembering something she wanted at the office, turned aside to the ever-open door, and found Mlle. Geneviève on duty at the desk.