ot afternoons and long, still
evenings for their own, with a warm, happy, gay world to play in, with
rocks half a mile up the shore, where the white canoe paddled about and
turned over suddenly in the warm water (one then navigated it upside
down, which was quite as agreeable), with the cheerful town waiting
always; and just behind the house steep hills of silver olive-gardens,
walling the bay from the trans-Apennine winds.

Climbing the stony paths that led straight up from the stone streets of
the town, one passed through gardens of oranges and sweet-smelling
lemons and long vineyards, and above the grey olive terraces and
chestnut woods, to the place of rocks and dark cypresses and green
stone-pines. Up there was a little lake of deep green water, with red
pine-bark lying in heaps by the edge, so that one made boats and raced
them across.

Thus, however much the Crevequers enjoyed the kind, gay and amusing
world--and they enjoyed it, as a rule, tremendously--they were always
aware that there was a better place waiting for them. Some day they
meant to go back there for good, in the days of repose that age should
bring them, and live together in the house beyond the long town (it
belonged to them; they had little other heritage), and cross the bay in
the canoe with the red stripe, that lay in the basement now and horribly
needed caulking, and land on the beach below the little city, and go up
to Mass in Sant' Ambrogio, and afterwards play games in the piazza and
sit outside the _parrucchiere's_ in the sun.

They had left Santa Caterina ten years ago; a sudden pricking of duty
had come to the hermit of the red house; his obedience to it had, as
Mrs. Venables said, cost him his life shortly afterwards.

Three most forlorn things Betty had in her memory, following on each
other: the leaving of Santa Caterina, Tommy's going away to school, and
the death, a year later, of the careless, indulgent eccentric. At the
first and last she and Tommy had wept together pitifully; at the middle
tragedy of the three the iron had entered into her soul, too deep for
tears. It had mattered infinitely most.

But there had been, through those four years, the holidays--holidays
mostly spent in an untrammelled and lawless liberty in London, with a
light-hearted and irresponsible old Irish gentleman, their grandfather.
It was in those days that they learnt to love the glamour of a great
city. London they had known, as they now knew Naples