I fancy that under the shadow of this suspicion my own manner may have been cold to him next morning.  Almost immediately after breakfast we set out for the church.  The day was sunny and warm; the atmosphere brilliant after the night’s rain.  The hedges exhaled a scent of spring.  And, as we entered the churchyard, I saw the girl Julia Constantine seated in her favourite angle between the porch and the south wall, threading a chain of daisies.

“What an amazingly handsome girl!” my guest exclaimed.

“Why, yes,” said I, “she has her good looks, poor soul!”

“Why ’poor soul’?”

“She is an imbecile, or nearly so,” said I, fitting the key in the lock.

We entered the church.  And here let me say that, although I furnished you at the time of their discovery with a description of the frescoes and the ruder drawings which overlay them, you can scarcely imagine the grotesque and astonishing coup d’oeil presented by the two series.  To begin with the frescoes, or original series.  One, as you know, represented the Crucifixion.  The head of the Saviour bore a large crown of gilded thorns, and from the wound in His left side flowed a continuous stream of red gouts of blood, extraordinarily intense in colour (and intensity of colour is no common quality in fresco-painting).  At the foot of the cross stood a Roman soldier, with two female figures in dark-coloured drapery a little to the right, and in the background a man clad in a loose dark upper coat, which reached a little below the knees.

The same man reappeared in the second picture, alone, but carrying a tall staff or hunting spear, and advancing up a road, at the top of which stood a circular building with an arched doorway and, within the doorway, the head of a lion.  The jaws of this beast were open and depicted with the same intense red as the Saviour’s blood.

Close beside this, but further to the east, was a large ship, under sail, which from her slanting position appeared to be mounting over a long swell of sea.  This vessel had four masts; the two foremost furnished with yards and square sails, the others with lateen-shaped sails, after the Greek fashion; her sides were decorated with six gaily painted bands or streaks, each separately charged with devices—­a golden saltire on a green ground, a white crescent on a blue, and so on; and each masthead bore a crown with a flag or streamer fluttering beneath.

Of the frescoes these alone were perfect, but fragments of others were scattered over the wall, and in particular I must mention a group of detached human limbs lying near the ship—­a group rendered conspicuous by an isolated right hand and arm drawn on a larger scale than the rest.  A gilded circlet adorned the arm, which was flexed at the elbow, the hand horizontally placed, the forefinger extended towards the west in the direction of the picture of the Crucifixion, and the thumb shut within the palm beneath the other three fingers.