‘Very good, Your Honour,’ the lackeys would answer by the doctor’s orders, and wink at each other.
There was one thing in real life which could still excite the aged count: the naked feet of women, of the labouring women who worked in the plantations, and were sometimes obliged to pass him on their way. His eyes under the once arched brows would open wide, and from under his eyelids a flash dart forth which greedily devoured the foot from the sole upwards, and rested on the hips, excitedly but with the critical appraisement of the connoisseur.
On this August day when the air was trembling with heat, and fire was pouring down from the sky, the count was sitting in his deck-chair as usual. He had taken his wonted walk through the bizarre plantation, but to-day he had tarried longer over it. He had stood still in places which he avoided as a rule, from which he would purposely turn away. For a long time he had stood looking at a small tree in a round wooden tub which the gardener had just carried out from the hothouse; it was a Taggiasca, the rarest kind of olive, which covers the steep hillsides of Porto Mauricio on the Italian Riviera. He
