re Via Renzo; while naturally Via Lucia led
us up to the ancient grey _osteria_ where the virtuous heroine was born
and lived. We went in, of course, and Sir Ralph ordered red wine of the
country, to give us an excuse to sit and stare at the coloured
lithographs and statuettes of the lovers, and to peep into the really
beautiful old kitchen with the ruddy gleams of copper in its dusky
shadows, its bright bits of painted china, its pretty window and huge
fireplace.

On a shelf close by the fire sat a cat, and I attempted to stroke it,
for it looked old enough and important enough to have belonged to Lucia
herself. But I might have known that it would not suffer my caresses,
for it's nearly always so with foreign cats and dogs, I find. The lack
of confidence in their own attractions which they show is as pathetic as
that of a neglected wife; they never seem to think of themselves as
pets.

Aunt Kathryn would persist in talking of Innominato as "Abominato"
(which was after all more appropriate), and the generous display of
Lucia's charms in the pictures caused her basely to doubt that most
virtuous maiden's genuine merit. "If the girl hadn't worn such dresses,
they wouldn't have painted her in them," she argued. "If she _did_ wear
them, she was a minx who got no more than she might have expected,
prancing about lonely mountain roads in such shameless things. And I
don't want a piece of wood from the shutter of her bedroom to take away
with me. I should be mortified to tell any ladies in Denver what it was;
and what's the good of carting souvenirs of your travels around with
you, if you can't tell people about them?"

We got back to our lakeside hotel sooner than we had thought, and the
landlord prayed us to see one more of Lecco's great sights. "It is not
as if I asked you to go out of your way to look at some fine old ruin or
a beautiful view," he pleaded. "You have seen many such on your journey,
and you will see many more; but this thing to which I would send you is
unique. There is nothing like it anywhere else in the world; and to go
will take you five minutes."

This excited Aunt Kathryn's curiosity, but when she heard that "it" was
only a wonderful model of the cathedral at Milan, exact in every
smallest detail and made by one man, she thought that she would seize
the opportunity of lying down while the others went, and be fresh for
our start, in an hour's time.

The idea of a model in wood of such a masterpie