Livio added, resuming his own tongue, "Santa Caterina da Siena visited Castoleto. Are you a Christian?"
"Oh, well," said Peter, who found the subject difficult, and was not good at thinking out difficult things. Livio nodded. "One doesn't want much church, of course; that's best for the women. But so many English aren't Christians at all, but heretics."
They came into Castoleto, which is a small place where the sea washes a shingly shore just below the town, and the narrow streets smell of fish and other things. Livio waved his hand towards a large new hotel that stood imposingly on the hill just behind the town.
"There we will go this evening, I with my music, you with your embroideries." That seemed a good plan. Till then they separated, Livio going to try his fortune at the fair, and Peter and Thomas and Francesco and Suor Clara (the donkey) establishing themselves on the shore by the edge of the waveless sea. There Peter got out of the cart a tea-caddy and a spirit lamp and made tea (he was always rather unhappy if he missed his tea) and ate biscuits, and gave Thomas—now an interested and cheerful person of a year and a half old—milk and sopped biscuit, and produced a bone for Francesco and carrots for Clara, and so they all had tea.
It was the hour when the sun dips below the western arm of hills that shuts the little bay, leaving behind it two lakes of pure gold, above and below. The sea burned like a great golden sheet of liquid glass spreading, smooth and limpid, from east to west, and swaying with a gentle hushing sound to and fro which was all the motion it had for waves. From moment to moment it changed; the living gold melted into green and blue opal tints, tender like twilight.
"After tea we'll go paddling," Peter told Thomas. "And then perhaps we'll get a fisherman to take us out while he drops his net. Santa Caterina should give good fishing."
In the town they were having a procession. Peter heard the chanting as they passed, saw, through the archways into the streets, glimpses of it. He heard their plaintive hymn that entreated pity:
"Difendi, O Caterina
Da peste, fame e guerra,
Il popol di Cartoleto
In mare e in terra..."
Above the hymn rose the howls of little St. John the Baptist, who had been, no doubt, suddenly mastered by his too high-spirited lamb and upset on to his face, so that his mother had to rush from out the crowd to comfort him and brush the dust from his curls that had been a-curling in papers these three weeks past.
It was no doubt a beautiful procession, and Peter and Thomas loved processions, but they had seen one that morning at Varenzano, so they were content to see and hear this from a distance.