She wore a black and white striped silk dress, with a sort of muslin bodice covered with lace, and there was a large bunch of violets in her waistband.  The horses were beautiful in the sunshine, and their red hides glistened in the long, slanting rays.  She put up her parasol and tried to understand, but she could only see the angles of houses, and the eccentricity of every passer-by.  She saw very clearly the thin, facial line, and her eyes rested on the touch of purple at the throat to mark his Roman dignity.  Father Daly sat opposite, rubbing his thumbs like one in the presence of a superior.  He was not ill-looking, but so shy that his features passed unperceived, and it was some time before she saw his eyes; they were always cast down, and his thin, well-cut nose disappeared in his freckled cheeks.  The cloth he wore was coarser than Monsignor’s; his heavy shoes contrasted with the finely-stitched and buckled shoes of the Papal prelate.

This visit to the convent frightened Evelyn more than the largest audience that had ever assembled to hear her, and, until they got clear of the town, she was not certain she would not plead some excuse and tell the coachman to turn back.  But now it was too late.  The carriage ascended the steep street, and, at the top of it, the town ended abruptly at the edge of the common.  On one side was a high brick wall, hiding the grounds and gardens of the villas; on the other was the common, seen through the leaves of a line of thin trees.  In her nervous agitation, she saw very distinctly—­the foreground teeming with the animation of cricket, the more remote parts solitary, the windmill hovering in a corner out of the way of the sunset, and two horsemen and a horsewoman cantering along the edge of the long valley into which the plain dropped precipitously.  The sun sank in a white sky, and Evelyn caught the point of one of the ribs of her parasol, so that she could hold it in a better position to shade her eyes, and she saw how the houses stretched into a point, the last being an inn, no doubt the noisy resort of the cricketers and the landscape painters.  There was a painter making his way towards the valley, his paint-box on his back.  But at that moment the carriage turned into a lane where a paling enclosed the small gardens.  She then noticed the decaying pear or apple tree, to which was attached a clothes-line.  Enormous sunflowers weltered in the dusty corners.  The brick was crumbling and broken, beautiful in colour, “And in every one of these cottages someone is living; someone is laughing; someone will soon be dead.  Good heavens, how strange!”

“We are nearly there.”

Evelyn started; it was Father Daly speaking to her.  “The cottages have spoilt the appearance on this side, but the view is splendid from the other.”