Monks and priests were coming and going, and dropped on the steps leading from terrace to terrace were women and children on their knees in prayer.  It was all richly reminiscent of pilgrim scenes in other Catholic lands; but here there was a touch of earnest in the Northern face of the worshipers which the South had never imparted.  Even in the beautiful rococo interior of the church at the top of the hill there was a sense of something deeper and truer than mere ecclesiasticism; and March came out of it in a serious muse while the boy at his side did nothing to interrupt.  A vague regret filled his heart as he gazed silently out over the prospect of river and city and vineyard, purpling together below the top where he stood, and mixed with this regret was a vague resentment of his wife’s absence.  She ought to have been there to share his pang and his pleasure; they had so long enjoyed everything together that without her he felt unable to get out of either emotion all there was in it.

The forgotten boy stole silently down the terraces after the rest of the party who had left him behind with March.  At the last terrace they stopped and waited; and after a delay that began to be long to Mrs. Adding, she wondered aloud what could have become of them.

Kenby promptly offered to go back and see, and she consented in seeming to refuse:  “It isn’t worth while.  Rose has probably got Mr. March into some deep discussion, and they’ve forgotten all about us.  But if you will go, Mr. Kenby, you might just remind Rose of my existence.”  She let him lay her jacket on her shoulders before he left her, and then she sat down on one of the steps, which General Triscoe kept striking with the point of her umbrella as he stood before her.

“I really shall have to take it from you if you do that any more,” she said, laughing up in his face.  “I’m serious.”

He stopped.  “I wish I could believe you were serious, for a moment.”

“You may, if you think it will do you any good.  But I don’t see why.”

The general smiled, but with a kind of tremulous eagerness which might have been pathetic to any one who liked him.  “Do you know this is almost the first time I have spoken alone with you?”

“Really, I hadn’t noticed,” said Mrs. Adding.

General Triscoe laughed in rather a ghastly way.  “Well, that’s encouraging, at least, to a man who’s had his doubts whether it wasn’t intended.”

“Intended?  By whom?  What do you mean, General Triscoe?  Why in the world shouldn’t you have spoken alone with me before?”

He was not, with all his eagerness, ready to say, and while she smiled pleasantly she had the look in her eyes of being brought to bay and being prepared, if it must come to that, to have the worst over, then and there.  She was not half his age, but he was aware of her having no respect for his years; compared with her average American past as he understood it, his social place was much higher, but, she was not in the least awed by it; in spite of his war record she was making him behave like a coward.  He was in a false position, and if he had any one but himself to blame he had not her.  He read her equal knowledge of these facts in the clear eyes that made him flush and turn his own away.