"She is beautiful; but I don't like her," he replied.
"Why?" asked Miss Temple.
"I prefer the violets," replied Lucio, with a smile.
"Violets, Signor?" again questioned the girl.
"The modest beauties, Miss Temple. The beauties who hide themselves."
"Ah," she replied, without further remark.
They had almost reached the "Kulm," when a group of four men came towards them on foot. They emerge from a path that tortuously descends and re-climbs a small valley towards the end of the village. They were Don Giovanni Vergas, an Italian gentleman of a great Southern family, seventy years of age, with a still lively physiognomy, in spite of a fine, correctly cut white beard; Monsieur Jean Morel, a Frenchman, a Parisian, an old man of eighty, slender of figure, shrivelled and upright, with a clean-shaven face, furrowed with a thousand wrinkles, but on which physical strength was still to be read; Herr Otto von Raabe, a German from Berlin, a man of forty, tall, bony, and imposing, with a brown and haggard face, a little black, bristling beard, streaked with white, and two blue eyes, blue as blue-bottle flowers and the sky, and finally Massimo Granata, a Southern Italian, with a thin, yellowish face that could never have known youth, with a body all twisted with the rickets. He was already advanced in years, and invalided by a long, slow, incurable disease; his glance scintillated with goodness and intelligence, and a dreamy expression was in all his countenance.
The well-cut boots of Don Giovanni Vergas and the Parisian, Jean Morel, were covered with dust, as also were the big stout boots of Otto von Raabe and Massimo Granata. All four, in costume and bearing, had the appearance of having walked far. The German carried a large bundle of Alpine flowers, formed of wild geraniums, fine and rosy, bluebells long of stalk, and tall green grasses streaked with white, and his face every now and then was bent over the mountain flowers. Massimo Granata pressed to his bosom a bunch of gentians, some dark, some light, of a dark and pale violet, and of a violet-blue. The meeting with the four was for a moment only: their words were rapid and joyous.
"Where have you been?" asked Lucio Sabini.
"On high, on high," exclaimed Jean Morel vivaciously.