Philip sprang up, and Gino, who had flung wide his arms to let the glorious creature go, took him by the shoulders and shook him, and said, “Because we are married—­married—­married as soon as I knew you were, coming.  There was no time to tell you.  Oh. oh!  You have come all the way for nothing.  Oh!  And oh, your generosity!” Suddenly he became grave, and said, “Please pardon me; I am rude.  I am no better than a peasant, and I—­” Here he saw Philip’s face, and it was too much for him.  He gasped and exploded and crammed his hands into his mouth and spat them out in another explosion, and gave Philip an aimless push, which toppled him on to the bed.  He uttered a horrified Oh! and then gave up, and bolted away down the passage, shrieking like a child, to tell the joke to his wife.

For a time Philip lay on the bed, pretending to himself that he was hurt grievously.  He could scarcely see for temper, and in the passage he ran against Miss Abbott, who promptly burst into tears.

“I sleep at the Globo,” he told her, “and start for Sawston tomorrow morning early.  He has assaulted me.  I could prosecute him.  But shall not.”

“I can’t stop here,” she sobbed.  “I daren’t stop here.  You will have to take me with you!”

Chapter 3

Opposite the Volterra gate of Monteriano, outside the city, is a very respectable white-washed mud wall, with a coping of red crinkled tiles to keep it from dissolution.  It would suggest a gentleman’s garden if there was not in its middle a large hole, which grows larger with every rain-storm.  Through the hole is visible, firstly, the iron gate that is intended to close it; secondly, a square piece of ground which, though not quite, mud, is at the same time not exactly grass; and finally, another wall, stone this time, which has a wooden door in the middle and two wooden-shuttered windows each side, and apparently forms the facade of a one-storey house.

This house is bigger than it looks, for it slides for two storeys down the hill behind, and the wooden door, which is always locked, really leads into the attic.  The knowing person prefers to follow the precipitous mule-track round the turn of the mud wall till he can take the edifice in the rear.  Then—­being now on a level with the cellars—­he lifts up his head and shouts.  If his voice sounds like something light—­a letter, for example, or some vegetables, or a bunch of flowers—­a basket is let out of the first-floor windows by a string, into which he puts his burdens and departs.  But if he sounds like something heavy, such as a log of wood, or a piece of meat, or a visitor, he is interrogated, and then bidden or forbidden to ascend.  The ground floor and the upper floor of that battered house are alike deserted, and the inmates keep the central portion, just as in a dying body all life retires to the heart.  There is a door at the