But unfortunately Mrs. Fisher also was filled with a desire to get to San Salvatore first and pick out the room or rooms she preferred, and she and Lady Caroline had after all traveled together.  As early as Calais they began to suspect it; in Paris they feared it; at Modane they knew it; at Mezzago they concealed it, driving out to Castagneto in two separate flys, the nose of the one almost touching the back of the other the whole way.  But when the road suddenly left off at the church and the steps, further evasion was impossible; and faced by this abrupt and difficult finish to their journey there was nothing for it but to amalgamate.

Because of Mrs. Fisher’s stick Lady Caroline had to see about everything.  Mrs. Fisher’s intentions, she explained from her fly when the situation had become plain to her, were active, but her stick prevented their being carried out.  The two drivers told Lady Caroline boys would have to carry the luggage up to the castle, and she went in search of some, while Mrs. Fisher waited in the fly because of her stick.  Mrs. Fisher could speak Italian, but only, she explained, the Italian of Dante, which Matthew Arnold used to read with her when she was a girl, and she thought this might be above the heads of boys.  Therefore Lady Caroline, who spoke ordinary Italian very well, was obviously the one to go and do things.

“I am in your hands,” said Mrs. Fisher, sitting firmly in her fly.  “You must please regard me as merely an old woman with a stick.”

And presently, down the steps and cobbles to the piazza, and along the quay, and up the zigzag path, Lady Caroline found herself as much obliged to walk slowly with Mrs. Fisher as if she were her own grandmother.

“It’s my stick,” Mrs. Fisher complacently remarked at intervals.

And when they rested at those bends of the zigzag path where seats were, and Lady Caroline, who would have liked to run on and get to the top quickly, was forced in common humanity to remain with Mrs. Fisher because of her stick, Mrs. Fisher told her how she had been on a zigzag path once with Tennyson.

“Isn’t his cricket wonderful?” said Lady Caroline absently.

“The Tennyson,” said Mrs. Fisher, turning her head and observing her a moment over her spectacles.

“Isn’t he?” said Lady Caroline.

“And it was a path, too,” Mrs. Fisher went on severely, “curiously like this.  No eucalyptus tree, of course, but otherwise curiously like this.  And at one of the bends he turned and said to me—­I see him now turning and saying to me—­”

Yes, Mrs. Fisher would have to be checked.  And so would these two up at the window.  She had better begin at once.  She was sorry she had got off the wall.  All she need have done was to have waved her hand, and waited till they came down and out into the garden to her.