Pierre jumped up on the low stone wall and extended his hand to Eva. "Come!" he said, hastily.
Rod put out his arm and pushed each outside pony, as he passed Eva, forcibly against his mate who had the inside place; a broad space was thus left beside her, and she had no need to leave the causeway. She had given one hand to Pierre as a beginning; he held it tightly. Mademoiselle meanwhile had climbed the wall like a cat. There were twenty of the galloping little nags; they took a minute or two to pass. Rod's out-stretched hands, as he warded them off, were seen to be large and brown.
Eva imagined them "grubbing up" the stumps. "What is grubbing?" she said.
"It is writing for the newspapers in a street in London," said Pierre, jumping down. "And you must wear a torn coat, I believe." Pierre was proud of his English.
He presented his flowers.
Mademoiselle admired them volubly. "They are like souls just ready to wing their way to another world," she said, sentimentally, with her head on one side. She put her well-gloved hand in Eva's arm, summoned Pierre with an amiable gesture to the vacant place at Eva's left hand, and the three walked on together.
The Deserto, though disestablished and dismantled, like many another monastery, by the rising young kingdom, held still a few monks; their brown-robed brethren had aided Pierre's servant in arranging the table in the high room which commands the wonderful view of the sea both to the north and the south of the Sorrento peninsula, with Capri lying at its point too fair to be real—like an island in a dream.
| "O la douce folie— |
| Aimable Capri!" |
said Mark Ferguson. No one knew what he meant; he did not know himself. It was a poetical inspiration—so he said.