We can suppose that remorse at having treated her Saint after this fashion, and relief at his not having fallen into the hands of a policeman, as she at first had most reasonably feared, had worked the change.

Policeman, indeed!  Signor Cesare Garelli—­such the visitor gave as his name—­appeared to her to be quite a charming person.  To be sure, he was bald, but that mattered little.  So was Julius Caesar and a host of other great men.

Cesare Garelli was something, to her, infinitely more interesting than his great namesake ever had been.  He was a partner of the well-known Zucco, and the office they kept in Via Carlo Alberto had wooden cups of gold nuggets, no end of glittering coins and crisp bank-notes of foreign and formidable appearance, in its solitary window.  More than once she had longingly halted before its treasures.

So a vast deal of information was exchanged on both sides, and when Signor Cesare Garelli rose to go, the flood of golden sunshine had crept quite across to the other side of the street.

Apparently some of it had crept into Guiseppina’s heart also, for she refrained from flying out when the long-delayed “minestra” turned out to be smoked, and she even went so far as to give Saint Antonio a chaste kiss as she restored him to the crooked nail to which he had hung for so long a time.

Cesare Garelli’s visits became more and more frequent in Via Santa Teresa.  Then followed excursions to Rivoli, to Superza, to Moncalieri.  Nice little dinners, and evenings spent at the Caffe San Carlo or under the horse-chestnuts in the Valentino garden, succeeded rapidly.  La Signora Pace’s life savoured of the seventh heaven, and Guiseppina’s temper grew mellow as the peaches which her admirer was for ever sending her.

That phase passed away, and then one fine day Cesare Garelli burst forth in all the glory and radiance of a declared and accepted lover.

In less than three months from the date of Saint Antonio’s flight through the window into the hot, dusty street, Guiseppina voluntarily—­oh, how voluntarily!—­renounced the name of Pace for ever and took that of Garelli.

If you want to know if Saint or Satan made his match for him, you had better ask Cesare Garelli himself.  I cannot tell you.

A. BERESFORD.

IN A BERNESE VALLEY.

    I met her by this mountain stream
      At twilight’s fall long years gone by,
    While, rosy with day’s afterbeam,
      Yon snow-peaks glowed against the sky;

    And she was but a simple maid
      Who fed her goats among the hills,
    And sang her songs within the glade,
      And caught the music of the rills;

    And drank the fragrance of the flowers
      That bloomed within love-haunted dells;
    And wandered home in gloaming hours,
      Amid the sound of tinkling bells.