The gate opened, and Don Rocco, standing in the middle of the courtyard, saw the delicate, ironical face of Professor Marin.

The professor, when he perceived Don Rocco, came to a stand, with his legs well apart, his hands clasped behind his back, silently wagging his head and his shoulders from right to left, and smiling with an inexpressible mixture of condolence and banter.  Poor Don Rocco on his side looked at him, also silent, smiling obsequiously, red as a tomato.

“The whole business, eh?” finally said the professor, cutting short his mimicry and becoming serious.

“Yes, the whole business,” answered Don Rocco in sepulchral tones.  “They didn’t leave a drop.”

“Thunder!” exclaimed the other, stifling a laugh; and he came forward.

“It is nothing, nothing at all, you know, my son,” said he with sudden good nature.  “Give me a pinch.  It is nothing,” he continued, taking the snuff.  “These are things that can be remedied.  The Countess Carlotta has made so much wine that, as I say, for her a few casks more, a few casks less...  You understand me!  She is a good woman, my son, the Countess Carlotta; a good woman.”

“Yes, good, good,” mumbled Don Rocco, looking into his snuff-box.

“You are a lucky man, my dear,” continued Marin, slapping him on the shoulder.  “You are as well off here as the Pope.”

“I am satisfied, I am satisfied,” said Don Rocco, smiling and smoothing out his brows for a moment.  It pleased him to hear these words from an intimate friend of the Countess Carlotta.

The professor gazed around admiringly as if he saw the place for the first time.  “It is a paradise!” said he, letting his eyes pass along the dirty walls of the courtyard and then raising them to the fig tree picturesquely hidden under the bell-tower in the high corner between the gateway and the old convent.

“Only for that fig tree!” he added.  “Is it not a beauty?  Does it not express the poetry of the southern winter, tepid and quiet?  It is like a word of sweetness, of happy innocence, tempering the severity of the sacred walls.  Beautiful!”

Don Rocco looked at his fig tree as if he saw it for the first time.  He was fond of it, but he had never suspected that it possessed such wonderful qualities.

“But it gives little figs,” said he, in the tone of a father who hears his son praised in his presence and rejoices, but says something severe lest he become puffed up, and also to hide his own emotion.  Then he invited the professor to make himself at home in the house.

“No, no, my dear,” answered the professor, silently laughing at that phrase about the little figs.  “Let us take a short stroll:  it is better.”

Passing slowly across the courtyard, they came out into the vineyard, whose festoons crowned both declivities of the hill, and they passed along the easy, grassy ascent between one declivity and the other.