ments one by one: we lingered and returned and compared; we studied; we melted together in unanimous homage. At last, the light began to fade and the little saintly figures to grow quaint and terrible in the gathering dusk. The loutish boy had transferred himself significantly to the door-post: we lingered for a farewell glance.
"Mr. Brooke," said my companion, "we ought to learn from all this to be real; real even as Giotto is real; to discriminate between genuine and factitious sentiment; between the substantial and the trivial; between the essential and the superfluous; sentiment and sentimentality."
"You speak," said I, "with appalling wisdom and truth. You strike a chill to my heart of hearts."
She spoke unsmiling, with a slightly contracted brow and an apparent sense of effort. She blushed as I gazed at her.
"Well," she said, "I'm extremely glad to have been here. Good, wise Giotto! I should have liked to know you.—Nay, let me pay the boy." I saw the piece she put into his hand; he was stupefied by its magnitude.
"We shall not have done Padua," I said, as we left the garden, "unless we have been to the Caffé Pedrocchi. Come to the Caffé Pedrocchi. We have more than an hour before our train,—time to eat an ice." So we drove to the Caffé Pedrocchi, the most respectable café in the world; a café monumental, scholastic, classical.
We sat down at one of the tables on the cheerful external platform, which is washed by the gentle tide of Paduan life. When we had finished our ices. Miss Evans graciously allowed me a cigar. How it came about I hardly remember, but, prompted by some happy accident of talk, and gently encouraged perhaps by my smoke-wreathed quietude, she lapsed, with an exquisite feminine reserve, into a delicate autobiographical strain. For a moment she became egotistical; but with a modesty, a dignity, a lightness of touch which filled my eyes with admiring tears. She spoke of her home, her family, and the few events of her life. She had lost her mother in her early years; her two sisters had married young; she and her father were equally united by affection and habit. Upon one theme she touched, in regard
