visited at the Cavaliere's place, we
were soon invited to do the same. It was in this way that, with the luck
that attends Rendel wherever he goes, we came to see something of
domestic life in Italy, and that I found myself involved in another of
those adventures for which I naturally sought so little.

I wonder if there is any other place in Sicily so faultless as Sta.
Catarina? Taormina is a paradise, an epitome of all that is beautiful in
Italy,--Venice excepted. Girgenti is a solemn epic, with its golden
temples between the sea and hills. Cefalu is wild and strange, and
Monreale a vision out of a fairy tale; but Sta. Catarina!--

Fancy a convent of creamy stone and rose-red brick perched on a ledge of
rock midway between earth and heaven, the cliff falling almost sheer to
the valley two hundred feet and more, the mountain rising behind
straight towards the sky; all the rocks covered with cactus and dwarf
fig-trees, the convent draped in smothering roses, and in front a
terrace with a fountain in the midst; and then--nothing--between you and
the sapphire sea, six miles away. Below stretches the Eden valley, the
Concha d'Oro, gold-green fig orchards alternating with smoke-blue
olives, the mountains rising on either hand and sinking undulously away
towards the bay where, like a magic city of ivory and nacre, Palermo
lies guarded by the twin mountains, Monte Pellegrino and Capo Zafferano,
arid rocks like dull amethysts, rose in sunlight, violet in shadow:
lions couchant, guarding the sleeping town.

Seen as we saw it for the first time that hot evening in March, with the
golden lambent light pouring down through the valley, making it in
verity a "shell of gold," sitting in Indian chairs on the terrace, with
the perfume of roses and jasmines all around us, the valley of the
Oreto, Palermo, Sta. Catarina, Monreale,--all were but parts of a dreamy
vision, like the heavenly city of Sir Percivale, to attain which he
passed across the golden bridge that burned after him as he vanished in
the intolerable light of the Beatific Vision.

It was all so unreal, so phantasmal, that I was not surprised in the
least when, late in the evening after the ladies had gone to their
rooms, and the Cavaliere, Tom, and I were stretched out in chairs on the
terrace, smoking lazily under the multitudinous stars, the Cavaliere
said, "There is something I really must tell you both before you go to
bed, so that you may be spared any unnecessary