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frequent reference to her small means might have given him a wrong impression, and that he was going to offer to lend her money.

      "You must allow that I have not let les convenances stand in the way of your enjoyment of Signor Provana's society," Lady Felicia said, with her kindest smile, when the visitor had gone. "There are very few men—even of his age—whom I could permit you to walk about with, even in such a half-civilised place as San Marco; but Provana is an exceptional man, a person whom scandal could never touch."

      "And I think you like being with him," Grannie said, after a long pause, in which she had reclined in her most reposeful attitude, smiling at the after-glow above Bordighera.

      It was not that fine promontory only, but all life and the world that Lady Felicia saw before her bathed in golden light.

      Certainly Grannie had been curiously indulgent, curiously heedless of conventionalities, and curiously forgetful of the ways of the world in which she had lived from youth upward, when she thought that because San Marco was a quiet little place that had never basked in the sunlight of fashion, there would be no ill-natured talk about her granddaughter's tête-à-tête rambles with the Roman millionaire.

      To say that people had talked—the season visitors at the "Anglais," the spinsters and widows, the invalid parsons and their wives, who were mostly languishing for something to talk about—to say that these had talked about Vera and her millionaire would not have described the situation. They had talked of nothing else; and the talk had grown more and more animated and exciting with every day that witnessed another audacious sauntering to the cemetery, or ascent of a mule-path through the wood. Spinsters, whose thin legs had seldom carried them beyond the parade, adipose widows, whose scantness of breath made the gentlest ascent labour and trouble, took a sudden interest in the little white chapels and shrines among the olives, and happened to meet Provana and Vera returning from the hill, which made something to whisper about with one's next neighbour at dinner, and was at least an agreeable change from the daily grumbling about the bill of fare.

      "Veal again! and as stringy as ever.—Yes, I came face to face with them. He stalked past me in his gloomy way; and she did not even blush, but just said, good afternoon, as bold as brass."

      "How Lady Felicia can be so utterly regardless of etiquette!"

      "Oh, it's just like the rest of the smart set. They think they can defy the universe; and it's a surprise to them when they find themselves in the divorce court!"

      "I don't believe Lady Felicia was ever in the smart set. You have to be rich for that. I put her down as poor and proud, and those sort are generally ultra-particular."

      "I believe she's playing a deep game," said the spinster, and then the two friends looked down the long, narrow table to the corner where Vera sat, silent and thoughtful, pale in her black evening frock.

      "Do you think her so remarkably pretty?" asked the spinster, following on a discussion in the drawing-room after luncheon, when the parsons had expressed their admiration of Vera's delicate beauty.

      "Far from it," answered the plethoric widow. "You may call her ethereal," which one of the parsons had done; "I call her half-starved. She has no complexion and no figure, and looks as if she had never had enough to eat."

      It mattered little to Lady Felicia next day—after a quarter of an hour's grave conversation with Signor Provana, or to Vera, putting on her hat in the sunny little front room, and hearing the donkey's bells jingling in the garden below; it mattered really nothing to either grandmother or granddaughter what the world, as represented by the table d'hôte of the "Anglais," might think of them. Lady Felicia lay back among her pillows, smiling at the sea and the far-off hills as she had never smiled before; for, indeed, that lovely coast had taken a new colour under a new light—not the light that never was on sea or land, but the more mundane light of prosperity, a smiling future in which there should be no more the year in year out effort to keep up appearances upon inadequate means.

      And yet that smiling future depended upon a girl's whim, and at a word from Vera that cloud-built castle might vanish into thin air.

      "She could never be such an idiot as to refuse him," mused Grannie, disposed to be sanguine; "and, what is better, I believe she is really in love with him. After all, he is her first admirer, and that goes for a good deal. I was in love with an archbishop of seventy when I was fifteen; and I remember him now as quite the most delightful man I ever met."

      Provana was walking about the garden, while the surest-footed donkey in San Marco shook his bells and pawed up the loose gravel with the forefoot of impatience, lazily watched by his owner, a sun-baked lad of nineteen.

      There were several pairs of eyes on the watch at various windows when Vera came tripping out in her neat blue riding-skirt and sailor hat. It was her kit for the riding-school near Bryanston Square, where Grannie had given her a season's lessons, lest she should grow up without the young lady's indispensable accomplishment of sitting straight on a horse, and going over a fence without swinging out of her saddle.

      She had brought a handful of sugar for the donkey, and he had to be fed and patted and talked about before Signor Provana was allowed to take the slender foot in his broad hand while she sprang lightly to the saddle; and then the little company moved away, Vera on her great grey donkey, bells jingling, red and blue tassels flying, Provana walking beside her, and the sunburnt youth at the donkey's head, ready to hold the bridle when they came to the narrow hill-tracks.

      "Do they take that lad with them to play propriety?" asked the sourest of all the spinsters, with a malevolent giggle—a question which nobody answered—while the two parsons agreed that little Miss Davis looked prettier than ever in her riding clothes.

      Provana walked for a long time in absolute silence, while Vera prattled with the donkey-driver, exchanging scraps of Italian and insisting upon the donkey's biography.

      "How did he call himself?" " Sancho." "Was he called after Don Quixote's Sancho?" "Perdona, Signorina—Non so." "How old was he? Was he always good? Was he always kindly treated?" His driver assured her that the beast lived in a land of milk and honey, and seldom felt the sting of a whip, to emphasise which assurance his driver gave a sounding whack on Sancho's broad back. The only comfort was that the back was broad and the animal seemed well fed.

      "I would not have let you ride a starveling," Provana said; "but these people to whom God has given the loveliest land on earth have waited for the sons of the North to teach them common humanity."

      After this he walked on in silence till they were far away from the "Anglais," slowly climbing a stony ascent that called upon all Sancho's sure-footedness and the guide's care.

      Suddenly, in the silence of the wood, where the light fell like golden rain between the silver-grey leaves, Provana laid his hand on Vera's, and said in a low voice:

      "I feel as if you and I were going to the end of the world together; but in half an hour we shall be at the mill, and after that there will be the short down-hill journey home, and Grannie's tea-table, and the glory of my last day will be over."

      Vera looked at him wonderingly in a shy silence. The words seemed to mean more than anything he had ever said before. His tone had an underlying seriousness that was melancholy, and almost intense.

      They did not give much time to the mill and the processes of chocolate-making. The picturesque gorge, the waterfall leaping from crag to crag, the blue plane of sunlit sea, and the pale grey glimmer on the purple horizon that was said to be Corsica—these were the things they had come to look at, and they looked in silence, as if spell-bound.

      "Let us sit here and talk of ourselves, while Tomaso gives Sancho a rest and a mouthful of oats," Provana said; and he and Vera seated themselves on a stony bank above the waterfall, while Tomaso and Sancho retired to a distance of twenty yards, where a bend in the path hid donkey and driver.

      It was not usual for Provana to be silent when they two were alone together. There always seemed too much that he wanted to say in the short space of time; but now the minutes went by, seeming long to Vera in the unusual silence, which she broke at last by asking him,

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