y it.

"For more reasons than a few," he alleged. "To begin with, if I dared,
I should say because it is _your_ parish pump." He ventured a little
bow. "But, in the next place, because it is an Italian parish pump,
and somehow everything connected with Italy interests one. Then,
because it is the parish pump of Sampaolo, and I have always been
curious about Sampaolo. And finally, because it is a _human_ parish
pump--_et nihil humanum_ . . . . So please go on. How did Sampaolo
come to be an Island of the Distressed?"

"He 's not such a poor dissembler, after all,--when roused to action,"
thought Susanna. "But perhaps we have had enough Sampaolo for one
session. I must leave him with an appetite for more."

"Hark," she said, raising a finger, while her face became intent. "Is
n't that a skylark?"

Somewhere--just where one could n't tell at first--a bird was singing.
Many birds were singing, innumerable birds were chirruping, all about.
But this bird's song soared clear above the others, distinct from them,
away from them, creating for itself a kind of airy isolation. It was
an exquisitely sweet, liquid song, it was jocund, joyous, and it was
sustained for an astonishing length of time. It went on and on and on,
never faltering, never pausing, in soft trills and gay roulades, shrill
skirls or flute-like warblings, a continuous outpour, for I don't know
how many minutes. It was a song marvellously apposite to the bright
day and the wide countryside. The freshness of the air, the raciness
of the earth, the green of grass and trees, the laughing sunlight,--one
might have fancied it was the spirits of all these singing together in
unison.

"It's a skylark, sure enough," said Anthony, looking skywards. "But
where the mischief is he?"

And they gave eyes and ears to trying to determine, searching the
empyrean. Now his voice seemed to come from the west, now from the
north, the south, the east; it was the most deceptive, the most elusive
thing.

"Ah--there he is," Anthony cried, of a sudden, and pointed.

"Where? Where?" breathlessly asked Susanna, anxious as if life and
death hung on the question.

"There--look!" said Anthony, pointing again.

High, high up in the air, directly over their heads, they could discern
a tiny speck of black against the blue of the sky. They sat with their
necks craned back as far as they would go, and gazed at it like people
transfixed, whilst the sky pulsated to their