But Manisty did not forget her. Half-way down the path, he turned back to look at her, and saw that she was carrying a light waterproof, which aunt Pattie had forced upon her lest the scirocco should end in rain. He stopped and demanded it. Lucy resisted.
'I can carry that,' he urged impatiently; 'it isn't baskets.'
'You could carry those,' she said laughing.
'Not in a world that grows boys and sixpences. But I want that cloak.
Please!'
The tone was imperious and she yielded. He hurried on to join Eleanor, carrying the cloak with his usual awkwardness, and often trailing it in the dust. Lucy, who was very neat and precise in all her personal ways, suffered at the sight, and wished she had stood firm. But to be waited on and remembered by him was not a disagreeable experience; perhaps because it was still such a new and surprising one.
Presently they were on the level of the lake, and their boys guided them through a narrow and stony by-path, to the site of the temple, or as the peasant calls it the 'Giardino del Lago.'
It is a flat oblong space, with a two-storied farm building—part of it showing brickwork of the early Empire—standing upon it. To north and east runs the niched wall in which, deep under accumulations of soil, Lord Savile found the great Tiberius, and those lost portrait busts which had been waiting there through the centuries till the pick and spade of an Englishman should release them. As to the temple walls which the English lord uncovered, the trenches that he dug, and the sacrificial altar that he laid bare—the land, their best guardian, has taken them back into itself. The strawberries grow all over them; only strange billows and depressions in the soil make the visitor pause and wonder. The earth seems to say to him—'Here indeed are secrets and treasures—but not for you! I have been robbed enough. The dead are mine. Leave them in my breast. And you!—go your ways in the sun!'
They made their way across the strawberry fields, looking for the friends who were to join them—Reggie Brooklyn, Mr. Neal, and the two ladies. There was no sign of them whatever. Yet, according to time and trains, they should have been on the spot, waiting.
'Annoying!' said Manisty, with his ready irritability. 'Reggie might really have managed better.—Who's this fellow?'
It was the padrone or tenant of the Giardino, who came up and parleyed with them. Yes, 'Vostra Eccellenza' might put down their baskets and make their tea. He pointed to a bench behind the shed. The forestieri came every day; he turned away in indifference.