ter-colors and inhabited by
people whose lives would go on in chapters and volumes. The lawn seemed
to me of extraordinary extent, the garden-walls of incalculable height,
the whole air of the place delightfully still, private, proper to
itself. "My wife must be somewhere about," Mark Ambient said, as we went
in. "We shall find her perhaps; we have got about an hour before dinner.
She may be in the garden. I will show you my little place."

We passed through the house, and into the grounds, as I should have
called them, which extended into the rear. They covered but three or
four acres, but, like the house, they were very old and crooked, and
full of traces of long habitation, with inequalities of level and little
steps--mossy and cracked were these--which connected the different parts
with each other. The limits of the place, cleverly dissimulated, were
muffled in the deepest verdure. They made, as I remember, a kind of
curtain at the further end, in one of the folds of which, as it were,
we presently perceived, from afar, a little group. "Ah, there she is!"
said Mark Ambient; "and she has got the boy." He made this last remark
in a slightly different tone from any in which he yet had spoken. I
was not fully aware of it at the time, but it lingered in my ear and I
afterwards understood it.

"Is it your son?" I inquired, feeling the question not to be brilliant.

"Yes, my only child. He's always in his mother's pocket She coddles him
too much." It came back to me afterwards, too--the manner in which
he spoke these words. They were not petulant; they expressed rather a
sudden coldness, a kind of mechanical submission. We went a few steps
further, and then he stopped short and called the boy, beckoning to him
repeatedly.

"Dolcino, come and see your daddy!" There was something in the way he
stood still and waited that made me think he did it for a purpose. Mrs.
Ambient had her arm round the child's waist, and he was leaning against
her knee; but though he looked up at the sound of his father's voice,
she gave no sign of releasing him. A lady, apparently a neighbor,
was seated near her, and before them was a garden-table, on which a
tea-service had been placed.

Mark Ambient called again, and Dolcino struggled in the maternal
embrace, but he was too tightly held, and after two or three fruitless
efforts he suddenly turned round and buried his head deep in his
mother's lap. There was a certain awkwardness in the scene;