Odo, with a sigh, thrust the book in his pocket and rose to his feet. It was the hour of the promenade at the Valentino and he had promised the Countess Clarice to attend her. The old high-roofed palace of the French princess lay below him, in its gardens along the river: he could figure, as he looked down on it, the throng of carriages and chairs, the modishly dressed riders, the pedestrians crowding the footpath to watch the quality go by. The vision of all that noise and glitter deepened the sweetness of the woodland hush. He sighed again. Suddenly voices sounded in the road below--a man's speech flecked with girlish laughter. Odo hung back listening: the girl's voice rang like a bird-call through his rustling fancies. Presently she came in sight: a slender black-mantled figure hung on the arm of an elderly man in the sober dress of one of the learned professions--a physician or a lawyer, Odo guessed. Their being afoot, and the style of the man's dress, showed that they were of the middle class; their demeanour, that they were father and daughter. The girl moved with a light forward flowing of her whole body that seemed the pledge of grace in every limb: of her face Odo had but a bright glimpse in the eclipse of her flapping hat-brim. She stood under his tree unheeded; but as they rose abreast of him the girl paused and dropped her companion's arm. "Look! The cherry flowers!" she cried, and stretched her arms to a white gush of blossoms above the wall across the road. The movement tilted back her hat, and Odo caught her small fine profile, wide-browed as the head on some Sicilian coin, with a little harp-shaped ear bedded in dark ripples. "Oh," she wailed, straining on tiptoe, "I can't reach them!" Her father smiled. "May temptation," said he philosophically, "always hang as far out of your reach." "Temptation?" she echoed. "Is it not theft you're bent on?" "Theft? This is a monk's orchard, not a peasant's plot." "Confiscation, then," he humorously conceded. "Since they pay no taxes on their cherries they might at least," she argued, "spare a few to us poor taxpayers." "Ah," said her father, "I want to tax their cherries, not to gather them." He slipped a hand through her arm. "Come, child," said he, "does not the philosopher tell us that he who enjoys a thing possesses it? The flowers are yours already!" "Oh, are they?" she retorted. "Then why doesn't the loaf in the baker's window feed the beggar that looks in at it?" "Casuist!" he cried and drew her up the bend of the road.