ain at ten minutes to eight, father," said Jeanne.

"Well, dear, do you care to try your luck again, and return to the
assault of that Annia Faustina?"

"As you please, father."

We left the inn together by the by-road down the hill. I could not
believe my eyes. This old man with refined features who walked on my
left, leaning on his malacca cane, was M. Charnot. The same man who
received me so discourteously the day after I made my blot was now
relying on me to introduce him to an Italian nobleman; on me, a lawyer's
clerk. I led him on with confidence, and both of us, carried away by our
divers hopes, he dreaming of medals, I of the reopened horizon full of
possibilities, conversed on indifferent subjects with a freedom hitherto
unknown between us.

And this charming Parisienne, whose presence I divined rather than saw,
whom I dared not look in the face, who stepped along by her father's
side, light of foot, her eyes seeking the vault of heaven, her ear
attentive though her thoughts were elsewhere, catching her Parisian
sunshade in the hawthorns of Desio, was Jeanne, Jeanne of the
flower-market, Jeanne whom Lampron had sketched in the woods of St.
Germain! It did not seem possible.

Yet it was so, for we arrived together at the gates of the Villa
Dannegianti, which is hardly a mile from the inn.

I rang the bell. The fat, idle, insolent Italian porter was beginning
to refuse me admission, with the same words and gestures which he had so
often used. But I explained, in my purest Tuscan, that I was not of the
ordinary kind of importunate tourist. I told him that he ran a serious
risk if he did not immediately hand my card and my letter--Lampron's
card in an envelope--to the Comtesse Dannegianti.

From his stony glare I could not tell whether I had produced any
impression, nor even whether he had understood. He turned on his heel
with his keys in one hand and the letter in the other, and went on his
way through the shady avenue, rolling his broad back from side to side,
attired in a jacket which might have fitted in front, but was all too
short behind.

The shady precincts of which Lampron wrote did not seem to have been
pruned. The park was cool and green. At the end of the avenue of
plane-trees, alternating with secular hawthorns cut into pyramids, we
could see the square mass of the villa just peeping over the immense
clumps of trees. Beyond it the tops and naked trunks of a group of
umbrella pines stood silh