e
them for the credit of the woman he had loved so well.

CHAPTER X

ON GRIANTE

Dawn had broken over Italy and morning, in honeysuckle colours,
burned upon the mountain mists. Far beneath a lofty hillside the
world still slumbered and the Larian lake, a jewel of gold and
turquoise, shone amid her flowery margins. The hour was very silent;
the little towns and hamlets scattered beside Como, like clusters of
white and rosy shells, dreamed on until thin music broke from their
campaniles. Bell answered bell and made a girdle of harmony about
the lake, floating along the water and ascending aloft until no
louder than the song of birds.

Two women climbed together up the great acclivity of Griante. One
was brown and elderly, clad in black with an orange rag wrapped
about her brow--a sturdy, muscular creature who carried a great,
empty wicker basket upon her shoulders; the other was clad in a rosy
jumper of silk: she flashed in the morning fires and brought an
added beauty to that beautiful scene.

Jenny ascended the mountain as lightly as a butterfly. She was
lovelier than ever in the morning light, yet a misty doubt, a
watchful sadness, seemed to hover upon her forehead. Her wonderful
eyes looked ahead up the precipitous tract that she and the Italian
woman climbed together. She moderated her pace to the slower gait of
the elder and presently they both stopped before a little grey
chapel perched beside the hill path.

Mr. Albert Redmayne's silkworms, in the great airy shed behind his
villa, had nearly all spun their cocoons now, for it was June again
and the annual crop of mulberry leaves in the valleys beneath were
well-nigh exhausted.

Therefore Assunta Marzelli, the old bibliophile's housekeeper, made
holiday with his niece, now upon a visit to him, and together the
women climbed, where food might be procured for the last tardy
caterpillars to change their state.

They had started in the grey dawn, passed up a dry watercourse, and
proceeded where the vine was queen and there fell a scented filigree
of dead blossom from flowering olives. They had seen a million
clusters of tiny grapes already rounding and had passed through
wedges and squares of cultivated earth, where sprang alternate
patches of corn yellowing to harvest and the lush green of growing
maize. Figs and almonds and rows of red and white mulberries, with
naked branches stripped of foliage, broke the lines of the crops.
Here hedges sparkle