“No, no—­San Salvatore, San Salvatore”—­exclaimed Mrs. Wilkins, trying to hold on to what suit-cases she could.

“Si, si—­San Salvatore,” they all shouted, pulling.

“This can’t be San Salvatore,” said Mrs. Wilkins, turning to Mrs. Arbuthnot, who sat quite still watching her suit-cases being taken from her with the same patience she applied to lesser evils.  She knew she could do nothing if these men were wicked men determined to have her suit-cases.

“I don’t think it can be,” she admitted, and could not refrain from a moment’s wonder at the ways of God.  Had she really been brought here, she and poor Mrs. Wilkins, after so much trouble in arranging it, so much difficulty and worry, along such devious paths of prevarication and deceit, only to be—­

She checked her thoughts, and gently said to Mrs. Wilkins, while the ragged youths disappeared with the suit-cases into the night and the man with the lantern helped Beppo pull the rug off her, that they were both in God’s hands; and for the first time on hearing this, Mrs. Wilkins was afraid.

There was nothing for it but to get out.  Useless to try to go on sitting in the fly repeating San Salvatore.  Every time they said it, and their voices each time were fainter, Beppo and the other man merely echoed it in a series of loud shouts.  If only they had learned Italian when they were little.  If only they could have said, “We wish to be driven to the door.”  But they did not even know what door was in Italian.  Such ignorance was not only contemptible, it was, they now saw, definitely dangerous.  Useless, however, to lament it now.  Useless to put off whatever it was that was going to happen to them by trying to go on sitting in the fly.  They therefore got out.

The two men opened their umbrellas for them and handed them to them.  From this they received a faint encouragement, because they could not believe that if these men were wicked they would pause to open umbrellas.  The man with the lantern then made signs to them to follow him, talking loud and quickly, and Beppo, they noticed, remained behind.  Ought they to pay him?  Not, they thought, if they were going to be robbed and perhaps murdered.  Surely on such an occasion one did not pay.  Besides, he had not after all brought them to San Salvatore.  Where they had got to was evidently somewhere else.  Also, he did not show the least wish to be paid; he let them go away into the night with no clamour at all.  This, they could not help thinking, was a bad sign.  He asked for nothing because presently he was to get so much.

They came to some steps.  The road ended abruptly in a church and some descending steps.  The man held the lantern low for them to see the steps.

“San Salvatore?” said Mrs. Wilkins once again, very faintly, before committing herself to the steps.  It was useless to mention it now, of course, but she could not go down steps in complete silence.  No mediaeval castle, she was sure, was ever built at the bottom of steps.