back listening:  the girl’s voice rang like a bird-call through his rustling fancies.  Presently she came in sight:  a slender black-mantled figure hung on the arm of an elderly man in the sober dress of one of the learned professions—­a physician or a lawyer, Odo guessed.  Their being afoot, and the style of the man’s dress, showed that they were of the middle class; their demeanour, that they were father and daughter.  The girl moved with a light forward flowing of her whole body that seemed the pledge of grace in every limb:  of her face Odo had but a bright glimpse in the eclipse of her flapping hat-brim.  She stood under his tree unheeded; but as they rose abreast of him the girl paused and dropped her companion’s arm.

“Look!  The cherry flowers!” she cried, and stretched her arms to a white gush of blossoms above the wall across the road.  The movement tilted back her hat, and Odo caught her small fine profile, wide-browed as the head on some Sicilian coin, with a little harp-shaped ear bedded in dark ripples.

“Oh,” she wailed, straining on tiptoe, “I can’t reach them!”

Her father smiled.  “May temptation,” said he philosophically, “always hang as far out of your reach.”

“Temptation?” she echoed.

“Is it not theft you’re bent on?”

“Theft?  This is a monk’s orchard, not a peasant’s plot.”

“Confiscation, then,” he humorously conceded.

“Since they pay no taxes on their cherries they might at least,” she argued, “spare a few to us poor taxpayers.”

“Ah,” said her father, “I want to tax their cherries, not to gather them.”  He slipped a hand through her arm.  “Come, child,” said he, “does not the philosopher tell us that he who enjoys a thing possesses it?  The flowers are yours already!”

“Oh, are they?” she retorted.  “Then why doesn’t the loaf in the baker’s window feed the beggar that looks in at it?”

“Casuist!” he cried and drew her up the bend of the road.

Odo stood gazing after them.  Their words, their aspect, seemed an echo of his reading.  The father in his plain broadcloth and square-buckled shoes, the daughter with her unpowdered hair and spreading hat, might have stepped from the pages of the romance.  What a breath of freshness they brought with them!  The girl’s cheek was clear as the cherry-blossoms, and with what lovely freedom did she move!  Thus Julie might have led Saint Preux through her “Elysium.”  Odo crossed the road and, breaking one of the blossoming twigs, thrust it in the breast of his uniform.  Then he walked down the hill to the inn where the horses waited.  Half an hour later he rode up to the house where he lodged in the Piazza San Carlo.

In the archway Cantapresto, heavy with a nine years’ accretion of fat, laid an admonishing hand on his bridle.

“Cavaliere, the Countess’s black boy—­”

“Well?”

“Three several times has battered the door down with a missive.”