“I cannot give you the exact figures,” Mr. Heard replied.  “It has often taken me three weeks to travel from one end to the other.  It is probably not much smaller than the kingdom of Italy.”

“The kingdom of Italy.  Indeed!”

That settled it.  The conversation died abruptly; the friendly priest relapsed into silence.  He looked hurt and disappointed.  This was more than a joke.  He had done his best to be civil to a suffering foreigner, and this was his reward—­to be fooled with the grossest of fables.  Maybe he remembered other occasions when Englishmen had developed a queer sense of humour which he utterly failed to appreciate.  A liar.  Or possibly a lunatic; one of those harmless enthusiasts who go about the world imagining themselves to be the Pope or the Archangel Gabriel.  However that might be, he said not another word, but took to reading his breviary in good earnest, for the first time.

The boat anchored.  Natives poured out in a stream.  Mr. Muhlen drove up alone, presumably to his sumptuous hotel.  The bishop, having gathered his luggage together, followed in another carriage.  He enjoyed the drive along that winding upward track; he admired the festal decorations of the houses, the gardens and vineyards, the many-tinted rock scenery overhead, the smiling sunburnt peasantry.  There was an air of contentment and well-being about the place; something joyful, opulent, almost dramatic.

“I like it,” he concluded.

And he wondered how long it would be before he met his cousin, Mrs. Meadows, on whose account he had undertaken to break the journey to England.

Don Francesco, the smiling priest, soon outstripped both of them, in spite of a ten minutes’ conversation on the quay with the pretty peasant girl of the steamer.  He had engaged the fastest driver on the island, and was now tearing frantically up the road, determined to be the first to apprise the Duchess of the lunatic’s arrival.

CHAPTER II

The Duchess of San Martino, a kind-hearted and imposing lady of mature age who, under favourable atmospheric conditions (in winter-time, for instance, when the powder was not so likely to run down her face), might have passed, so far as profile was concerned, for a faded French beauty of bygone centuries—­the Duchess was no exception to the rule.

It was an old rule.  Nobody knew when it first came into vogue.  Mr. Eames, bibliographer of Nepenthe, had traced it down to the second Phoenician period, but saw no reason why the Phoenicians, more than anybody else, should have established the precedent.  On the contrary, he was inclined to think that it dated from yet earlier days; days when the Troglodytes, Manigones, Septocardes, Merdones, Anthropophagoi and other hairy aboriginals used to paddle across, in crazy canoes, to barter the produce of their savage African glens-serpent-skins, and gums, and gazelle horns,