since we saw each other last! Will you give me
lunch? I had only a cup of coffee and a croissant at La Turbie, and I'm
as hungry as a wolf."

"A wolf this shepherd is not afraid to let into his fold. Will I _not_
give you lunch? Though, alas! not being prepared for an honoured guest,
it will hardly be worth your eating. If you have changed, my Principino,
it is for the better. From a youth you have become a man."

They walked together across the _Place_, Vanno very slim and tall beside
the shorter, squarer figure of the man of fifty. Into the church the
cure led the Prince, and through the cool, incense-laden dusk to a door
standing wide open. Outside was a green brightness, which made the
doorway in the twilit church look like a huge block of flawed emerald
set into the wall.

"My garden," said the priest, speaking affectionately, as of a loved
child. "I think, Principino, you would like your _dejeuner_ in the grape
arbour. It is only a little arbour, and the garden is small. But wait,
you will see it has a charm that many grander gardens lack."

They stepped from the brown dusk of the church out into the bright
picture of a garden, which seemed unreal, a little garden in a dream, as
complete and perfect in its way, Vanno thought, as an old Persian prayer
rug.

It was a tangle of orange and lemon trees, looped with garlands of roses
and flowering creepers, carpeted with a thousand fragrant, old-fashioned
flowers, and arboured with grapevines, whose last year's leaves, though
sparse, were still russet and gold: altogether a mere bright ribbon of
beauty pinned like a lover's knot on a high shoulder of jutting rock.
Below fell a precipice, overhanging steep slopes of vineyard, or orange
plantations that went sliding down toward the far-off level of the sea,
and the world of the strangers. Above, towered the ruined castle,
immensely tall, its foundation-stones bedded in dark rock and draped in
ivy. In the little garden, the hum of bees among the flowers was like an
echo of far off, fairy harps.

"I think I am dreaming this," said Vanno. And he added, to himself:
"It's part of my kingdom, that I never saw before."

The cure laughed, delighted. "Luckily for me it is real," he said. "And
now that you are in it, my Principino--my one-time pupil, my all-time
friend--it is perfect. I should like you to love it. I should like--yes,
I should like some great happiness to come into your life here. That is
an odd fancy, isn't