“Not a bit of it,” cried the Conte, twinkling up again. “You’ll be too early if you set off now—it’s only twenty minutes from here. Take time to get your breath back and we’ll send you on your way. Look, I’ll have Fulco telephone. It must still be the same number as my cousin’s, I’ve got it here.” He snatched up a leather address book from a pile of albums, opened it on his knee, and pulled a monocle from his pocket. “Here we are. Oh no, no, that’s another cousin. Yes, here it is.”

Mrs. Drew smiled at him. The old man was like Proust’s duke, with all his cousins. He was also irresistibly kind. While the telephone call was made, she described her journey down the mountain.

“It was a woodsman who pointed out this house—the villa of ‘Il Honte.’” She reproduced the Tuscan pronunciation with a smile.

“I sometimes think,” said the old man, “that that chap in the poem of Catullus, who pronounced his ‘c’s as aspirates, must have come from hereabouts.” He broke off to declaim, “‘Chommoda dicebat, si quando commode vellet dicere—’ But forgive me, you were telling us about your drive down the mountain.”

“It was beautiful, really. So solitary, except for the woodsmen, and so silent, except for the birds. There must have been hundreds of birds singing beside the car all the way down.”

“There are upupe all over that mountain.”

“The striped one that looks like pieces of other old birds put together? Yes, I saw him. Pheasant, too—a lot of pheasant, mostly female.”

“There used to be boar up there, and deer, in the old days. Now only pheasant and hare. It doesn’t look it, but it was an inhabited place until fairly recently—there are overgrown paths that used to lead to farms. The farms are all derelict now, abandoned, everyone gone to the towns. It was too hard a life, you know—water’s the great difficulty, and then no electricity, and so cut off in winter. No one wants to do it these days.”

“I didn’t see a single building—oh, except a ruin, but that was no farm. More like a castle.”