Captain Gambier smiled brilliantly; and the lady, perceiving that polished shield, checked the shot of indignation on her astonished features, and laid it by.  But the astonishment lingered there, like the lines of a slackened bow.  She beheld her ideal of an English gentleman place himself before these recumbent foreign people, and turn to talk across them, with a pertinacious pursuit of the face under the bent straw hat.  Nor was it singular to her that one of them at last should rise and protest against the continuation of the impertinence.

Carlo Ammiani, in fact, had opened matters with a scrupulously-courteous bow.

“Monsieur is perhaps unaware that he obscures the outlook?”

“Totally, monsieur,” said Captain Gambier, and stood fast.

“Will monsieur do me the favour to take three steps either to the right or to the left?”

“Pardon, monsieur, but the request is put almost in the form of an order.”

“Simply if it should prove inefficacious in the form of a request.”

“What, may I ask, monsieur, is your immediate object?”

“To entreat you to behave with civility.”

“I am at a loss, monsieur, to perceive any offence.”

“Permit me to say, it is lamentable you do not know when you insult a lady.”

“I have insulted a lady?” Captain Gambier looked profoundly incredulous.  “Oh! then you will not take exception to my assuming the privilege to apologize to her in person?”

Ammiani arrested him as he was about to pass.

“Stay, monsieur; you determine to be impudent, I perceive; you shall not be obtrusive.”

Vittoria had tremblingly taken old Agostino’s hand, and had risen to her feet.  Still keeping her face hidden, she walked down the slope, followed at an interval by her servant, and curiously watched by the English officer, who said to himself, “Well, I suppose I was mistaken,” and consequently discovered that he was in a hobble.

A short duologue in their best stilted French ensued between him and Ammiani.  It was pitched too high in a foreign tongue for Captain Gambier to descend from it, as he would fain have done, to ask the lady’s name.  They exchanged cards and formal salutes, and parted.

The dignified altercation had been witnessed by the main body of the tourists.  Captain Gambier told them that he had merely interchanged amicable commonplaces with the Frenchman,—­“or Italian,” he added carelessly, reading the card in his hand.  “I thought she might be somebody whom we knew,” he said to Mrs. Sedley.

“Not the shadow of a likeness to her,” the lady returned.

She had another opinion when later a scrap of paper bearing one pencilled line on it was handed round.  A damsel of the party had picked it up near the spot where, as she remarked, “the foreigners had been sitting.”  It said:—­

          “Let none who look for safety go to Milan.”