"We arrived here about noon. We left about three. I loved it till we came to your house for dinner. Then..."
Antonio waited anxiously.
"Then," she continued, with a visible effort, "I ... longed with all my soul to be back in England. You said ... you remember what you said about our respecting this sacred place?"
"I remember," said Antonio, his heart swelling with thankfulness. He had cudgelled his wits in vain for a way of introducing his plan; but here was the opportunity ready to his hand.
"Well," she said, "we haven't come from England to respect this sacred place in the least. We have come to ruin and defile it. Those blue-and-white tile-pictures in the chapel are the most wonderful things I've ever seen; but we have come to tear them down. We have come to use the big rooms and long corridors for all sorts of experiments. We shall make them grimy with smoke and foul with fumes; and some fine day we shall have an accident and blow the whole place into the Atlantic, and ourselves with it."
Her bitter and vehement fluency struck the monk dumb.
"That isn't all," she added more bitterly than ever. "When they've fished us up out of the Atlantic and dressed our wounds we shall start making plans for a railway. We shall lose all our own money and make all the honest people in the district lose theirs too. But what will it matter? We shall get something for our gold and silver. We shall be honored with the company of the men who're going to make fortunes out of us and out of your country—men who don't know their own grandfathers. One of them will be kind enough to buy this domain from us for an old song and to build a fine square house out of the ruins. Senhor da Rocha, that is the way we are going to respect your sacred place."
Antonio succeeded in meeting her defiant gaze with a show of calmness; but there was a tremor in his voice as he said:
"If I did not know that the Senhorita is witty I should say that the Senhorita is doing herself a little injustice."
She knitted her brows while she framed an answer.