Lucy bent over them in a passion of pleasure, turning over the little things quite silently, but with sparkling looks.
'Would you like them?' said Manisty, who had followed them, and stood over her, cigarette in hand.
'Oh no!' said Lucy, rising in confusion. 'Don't get them for me.'
'Come away,' said Eleanor, laughing. 'Never interfere between a man and a bargain.'
The padrone indeed appeared at the moment. Manisty sent the ladies downstairs, and the bargaining began.
When he came downstairs ten minutes later a small basket was in his hand. He offered it to Lucy, while he held out his other hand to Eleanor. The hand contained two fragments only, but of exquisite quality, one a fine Artemis head with the Cybele crown, the other merely the mask or shell of a face, from brow to chin,—a gem of the purest and loveliest Greek work.
Eleanor took them with a critical delight. Her comments were the comments of taste and knowledge. They were lightly given, without the smallest pedantry, but Manisty hardly answered them. He walked eagerly to Lucy Foster, whose shy intense gratitude, covering an inward fear that he had spent far, far too much money upon her, and that she had indecorously provoked his bounty, was evidently attractive to him. He told her that he had got them for a mere nothing, and they sat down on the bench behind the house together, turning them over, he holding forth, and now and then discovering through her modest or eager replies, that she had been somehow remarkably well educated by that old Calvinist uncle of hers. The tincture of Greek and Latin, which had looked so repellent from a distance, presented itself differently now that it enabled him to give his talk rein, and was partly the source in her of these responsive grateful looks which became her so well. After all perhaps her Puritan stiffness was only on the surface. How much it had yielded already to Eleanor's lessons! He really felt inclined to continue them on his own account; to test for himself this far famed pliancy of the American woman.
Meanwhile Eleanor moved away, watching the path from Genzano which wound downwards from the Sforza Cesarini villa to the 'Giardino,' and was now visible, now hidden by the folds of the shore.
Presently Manisty and Lucy heard her exclamation.
'At last!—What has Reggie been about?'