She took two or three sips, paused awhile as though undecided whether she could possibly swallow such nasty stuff and then, with a fine show of reluctance, gulped it all down.  Denis was spell-bound; the dose, he artlessly imagined, was enough to kill a horse.  Far from being damaged, Miss Wilberforce took a chair beside him, and began to converse.  Charmingly she talked; all about England.  As he listened he grew delighted, entranced.  She was different, somehow, from all the other ladies he had lately met on the Continent.  She was altogether different.  Whence came it, he wondered?

Then, as the discourse proceeded, he began to realize what was the matter with them.  It was odd, he thought, that he had not noticed it before.  Miss Wilberforce made him realize wherein the difference lay.  They spoke English, it was true; but they had all taken on a Continental outlook; alien phrases, expressions, affectations; cosmopolitan airs and graces that jarred on his frank, untarnished English nature.  This one was otherwise.  She was old England, through and through.  The conversation cheered him to an unusual degree—­among all those foreign people he felt strangely drawn towards this wistful lady who could talk so naturally and conjure up, by the mere power of words, a breath of his own homestead in the Midlands.  He might have been sitting with an elder sister just then, eating strawberries and cream and watching a tennis match on some shady green lawn.  He was happy; happier still when Angelina once more floated into his ken and, noticing Miss Wilberforce, raised her eyebrows mischievously and gave him something that looked like a real smile, for a change.

She had another smile, however, for Mr. Edgar Marten; and yet another one for Don Francesco who, as she passed near him, profited by the occasion to give her a paternal semi-proprietary chuck under the chin, accompanying the indecorous movement with an almost audible wink.

Mr. Heard had noticed everything.  He frowned at first.  It gave him a little twinge, and some food for thought.  He was absurdly sensitive about women.

“A frolicsome child,” he mused.  “LASCIVA PUELLA.  Possibly wanton.”

What were this young man’s relations with the girl?  That contact of hand and chin—­what did it imply?  Was the action quasi-paternal, or pseudo-paternal?  Regretfully he decided that it was only pseudo-paternal.

And yet—­it was all so confoundedly natural!

“Nobody but our parroco could keep his hands off that girl,” blithely remarked the priest.

Another little twinge. . . .

CHAPTER VII

Mr. Heard was not prone to wax enthusiastic over the delights of architecture or natural scenery.  He called himself unexpansive and unromantic; he confessed to small understanding, small veneration, for artistic effects.  The beauty of a man’s character moved him more strongly than the beauty of any picture or any landscape.  Yet, on arriving next afternoon at the upper plateau of Nepenthe he could not help being struck by the strange and almost compelling charm of the “Old Town.”  It was so different from the lower regions—­so calm and reposeful.