"I beg your pardon," she said. "I can't think how I have allowed myself to become so tiresome. One prates of one's parish pump."
"Tiresome?" cried out Anthony, in spontaneous protest. "I can't tell you how much you interest me."
"He is the poorest of poor dissemblers," thought Susanna.
"You are extremely civil," she said. "But how can the condition of our parish pump possibly interest a stranger?"
"H'm," thought Anthony, taken aback, "I expect my interest does seem somewhat improbable."
So, speciously, he sought to justify it.
"For more reasons than a few," he alleged. "To begin with, if I dared, I should say because it is your parish pump." He ventured a little bow. "But, in the next place, because it is an Italian parish pump, and somehow everything connected with Italy interests one. Then, because it is the parish pump of Sampaolo, and I have always been curious about Sampaolo. And finally, because it is a human parish pump—et nihil humanum . . . . So please go on. How did Sampaolo come to be an Island of the Distressed?"
"He 's not such a poor dissembler, after all,—when roused to action," thought Susanna. "But perhaps we have had enough Sampaolo for one session. I must leave him with an appetite for more."
"Hark," she said, raising a finger, while her face became intent. "Is n't that a skylark?"
Somewhere—just where one could n't tell at first—a bird was singing. Many birds were singing, innumerable birds were chirruping, all about. But this bird's song soared clear above the others, distinct from them, away from them, creating for itself a kind of airy isolation. It was an exquisitely sweet, liquid song, it was jocund, joyous, and it was sustained for an astonishing length of time. It went on and on and on, never faltering, never pausing, in soft trills and gay roulades, shrill skirls or flute-like warblings, a continuous outpour, for I don't know how many minutes. It was a song marvellously apposite to the bright day and the wide countryside. The freshness of the air, the raciness of the earth, the green of grass and trees, the laughing sunlight,—one might have fancied it was the spirits of all these singing together in unison.