"What a happy surprise!" cried the curé, in Italian, and Vanno answered in the same language.
"But you knew I was coming one of these days. You got my letter? And perhaps Angelo has written?"
"Yes. He has written. I am to take the second breakfast with him and his bride one day soon after they arrive at Cap Martin, and bless their villa for them. You see, he too remembers the poor old friend!" and the curé smiled, a charming smile, showing beautiful teeth, strong and white as a boy's. "He said you would meet him, for the week of the flying men, but that is not quite yet. And your letter said the same. I did not look for you till some days later."
"Well, here I am," cried Vanno. "I came only yesterday afternoon, and my first thought is for you, Father. You look just the same. It might be months instead of years since we saw each other last! Will you give me lunch? I had only a cup of coffee and a croissant at La Turbie, and I'm as hungry as a wolf."
"A wolf this shepherd is not afraid to let into his fold. Will I not give you lunch? Though, alas! not being prepared for an honoured guest, it will hardly be worth your eating. If you have changed, my Principino, it is for the better. From a youth you have become a man."
They walked together across the Place, Vanno very slim and tall beside the shorter, squarer figure of the man of fifty. Into the church the curé led the Prince, and through the cool, incense-laden dusk to a door standing wide open. Outside was a green brightness, which made the doorway in the twilit church look like a huge block of flawed emerald set into the wall.
"My garden," said the priest, speaking affectionately, as of a loved child. "I think, Principino, you would like your déjeuner in the grape arbour. It is only a little arbour, and the garden is small. But wait, you will see it has a charm that many grander gardens lack."
They stepped from the brown dusk of the church out into the bright picture of a garden, which seemed unreal, a little garden in a dream, as complete and perfect in its way, Vanno thought, as an old Persian prayer rug.
It was a tangle of orange and lemon trees, looped with garlands of roses and flowering creepers, carpeted with a thousand fragrant, old-fashioned flowers, and arboured with grapevines, whose last year's leaves, though sparse, were still russet and gold: altogether a mere bright ribbon of beauty pinned like a lover's knot on a high shoulder of jutting rock. Below fell a precipice, overhanging steep slopes of vineyard, or orange plantations that went sliding down toward the far-off level of the sea, and the world of the strangers. Above, towered the ruined castle, immensely tall, its foundation-stones bedded in dark rock and draped in ivy. In the little garden, the hum of bees among the flowers was like an echo of far off, fairy harps.
"I think I am dreaming this," said Vanno. And he added, to himself: "It's part of my kingdom, that I never saw before."