Conversation about Sholto Grant's pictures passed easily into conversation about Jasmine's mother, because nearly all the pictures had been of her.
"She was a beautiful contadina, you know," Jasmine shyly told him.
Mr. Vibart, who supposed that her shyness was due to an attempt to avoid giving an impression of snobbishness in thus announcing the nobility of her ancestry, asked of what she was contadina. Jasmine, delighted at his mistake, laughed gaily.
"Contadina means country girl. Her name was Gelsomina, and she was the most beautiful girl in the island. Everybody wanted to paint her."
Mr. Vibart, struggling in the gulf between a baronet's niece and an artist's model had nothing to say, but he made up his mind to ask his uncle something about Italy. It was always difficult to find anything to talk about with the old gentleman; Italy as a topic ought to last through the better part of two bottles of Burgundy.
"And what's your name?" he asked at last.
"I was called after my mother."
"Oh, you were? Well, would you mind telling me your mother's name again, because I lost the last dozen letters?"
"Gelsomina—only I was always called Jasmine, which is the English for it."
As she spoke, all the bells in York began to ring at once, from the mastiff booming in York Minster to the rusty little cur yapping in a Methodist chapel close to where they were sitting, and with such gathering insistence in their clamour as to destroy the pleasure of these sunlit reminiscences.