"
"A wolf this shepherd is not afraid to let into his fold. Will I _not_
give you lunch? Though, alas! not being prepared for an honoured guest,
it will hardly be worth your eating. If you have changed, my Principino,
it is for the better. From a youth you have become a man."
They walked together across the _Place_, Vanno very slim and tall beside
the shorter, squarer figure of the man of fifty. Into the church the
cure led the Prince, and through the cool, incense-laden dusk to a door
standing wide open. Outside was a green brightness, which made the
doorway in the twilit church look like a huge block of flawed emerald
set into the wall.
"My garden," said the priest, speaking affectionately, as of a loved
child. "I think, Principino, you would like your _dejeuner_ in the grape
arbour. It is only a little arbour, and the garden is small. But wait,
you will see it has a charm that many grander gardens lack."
They stepped from the brown dusk of the church out into the bright
picture of a garden, which seemed unreal, a little garden in a dream, as
complete and perfect in its way, Vanno thought, as an old Persian prayer
rug.
It was a tangle of orange and lemon trees, looped with garlands of roses
and flowering creepers, carpeted with a thousand fragrant, old-fashioned
flowers, and arboured with grapevines, whose last year's leaves, though
sparse, were still russet and gold: altogether a mere bright ribbon of
beauty pinned like a lover's knot on a high shoulder of jutting rock.
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