



Produced by Mark C. Orton, Sam W. and the Online Distributed
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      OLIVE...
      IN ITALY


   BY MORAY DALTON


   [Illustration]


       London
   T. FISHER UNWIN
       MCMIX




[_All Rights Reserved_]




    "For in the hand of the Lord there is a cup, and the
    wine is red; it is full mixed, and He poureth out of the
    same. As for the dregs thereof: all the ungodly of the
    earth shall drink them...."




CONTENTS


    BOOK I.                 PAGE

      SIENA                   17


    BOOK II.

      FLORENCE               115


    BOOK III.

      ROME                   213




OLIVE IN ITALY




BOOK I.--SIENA




CHAPTER I


"I believe that Olive Agar is going to tell you that she can't pay her
bill," said the landlady's daughter as she set the breakfast tray down
on the kitchen table.

"Good gracious, Gwen, how you do startle one! Why?"

"She began again about the toast, and I told her straight that you
always set yourself against any unnecessary cooking. Meat and
vegetables must be done, I said, but those who can't relish bread as
it comes from the baker's, and plain boiled potatoes, can go without,
I said. Then she says, of course I must do as my mother tells me, and
would I ask you to step up and see her presently."

"Perhaps you were a bit too sharp with her."

The girl sniffed resentfully. "Good riddance if she goes," she called
after her mother.

Mrs Simons knocked perfunctorily at the dining-room door.

A young voice bade her come in. "I wanted to tell you that I heard
from my cousins in Italy this morning. I am going to stay with them
for a little, so I shall be leaving you at the end of the week."

The landlady's cold stare was disconcerting. There was a distinct note
of disapproval in her voice as she answered, "I do not know much about
Italy." She seemed to think it not quite a seemly subject, yet she
pursued it. "I should have thought it was better for a young lady
without parents or friends to find some occupation in her own
country."

Olive smiled. "Ah, but I hate boiled potatoes, and I think I shall
love Italy and Italian cooking. You remember the Athenians who were
always seeking some new thing? They had a good time, Mrs Simons."

"I hope you may not live to wish those words unsaid, miss," the woman
answered primly. "You have as good as sold your birthright, as Esau
did, in that speech."

"He was much nicer than Jacob."

"Oh, miss, how can you! But, after all, I suppose you are not
altogether one of us since you have foreign cousins. What's bred in
the bone comes out in the flesh they say."

"I am quite English, if that is what you mean. My aunt married an
Italian."

Mrs Simons's eyes had wandered from the girl's face to the heavy
chandelier tied up in yellow muslin, and thence, by way of "Bubbles,"
framed in tarnished gilt, to the door. "Ah, well, I shall take your
notice," she said finally.

She went down again into the kitchen. "I never know where to have
her," she complained. "There's something queer and foreign about her
for all she says. What's bred in the bone! I said that to her face,
and I repeat it to you, Gwendolen."

Mrs Simons might have added that adventures are to the adventurous.
Olive's father was Jack Agar, of the Agars of Lyme, and he married his
cousin. If Mrs Simons had known all that must be implied in this
statement she might have held forth at some length on the subject of
heredity, and have traced the girl's dislike of boiled potatoes to her
great-great-uncle's friendship with Lord Byron, and her longing for
sunshine to a still more remote ancestress, lady-in-waiting to a
princess at the court of Le Roi Soleil.

Adventures to the adventurous! The Agars were always aware of the
magnificent possibilities of life and love, and inclined to ignore the
unpleasant actualities of existence and the married state; hence some
remarkable histories, and, in the end, ruin. Olive was the last of the
old name. Jack Agar had died at thirty, leaving his wife and child
totally unprovided for but for the little annuity that had sufficed
for dress in the far-off salad days, and that now must be made to
maintain them. Olive was sent to a cheap boarding-school, where she
proved herself a fool at arithmetic; history, very good; conduct,
fair; according to her reports. She was not happy there. She hated
muddy walks and ink-stained desks and plain dumpling, and all these
things seemed to be an essential part of life at Miss Blake's.

She left at eighteen, and thereafter she and her mother lived together
in lodgings at various seaside resorts within their means, practising
a strict economy, improving their minds at the free library, doing
their own dressmaking, and keeping body and soul together on potted
meats, cocoa and patent cereals. Mary Agar rebelled sometimes in
secret, regretting the lack of "opportunities," _i.e._, of possible
husbands. She would have been glad to see her daughter settled. The
Agars never used commonsense in affairs of the heart. Her own marriage
had been very foolish from a worldly point of view, and her sister
Alice had run away with her music-master.

"In those days girls had a governess at home and finished with
masters, and young Signor Menotti came twice a week to our house in
Russell Square to teach Alice the guitar and mandoline. We shared
singing and French lessons, but she had him to herself. He was very
good-looking, dark, and rather haggard, and just shabby enough to make
one sorry for him. When Alice said she would marry him mamma was
furious, but she was just of age, and she had a little money of her
own, an annuity as I have, and she went her own way. They were
married at a registry office, I think, and soon afterwards they went
to his home in Italy. Mamma never forgave, but Alice and I used to
write to each other, and her eldest child was called after me. I don't
know how it turned out. She never said she was unhappy, but she died
after eight years, leaving her three little girls to be brought up by
their father's sister."

Olive knew little more than this of her aunt. Further questioning
elicited the fact that Signor Menotti's name was Ernesto.

"The girls are your cousins, Olive dear, and you have no other
relations. I should like to see them."

"So should I."

Olive knew all about the annuity, but she had not realised until her
mother died quite suddenly, of heart failure after influenza, what it
means to have no money at all. She was dazed with grief at first, and
Mrs Simons was as kind as could be expected and did not thrust the
weekly bill upon her on the morning after the funeral, though it was
due on that day. But lodgers are not supposed to give much trouble,
and though death is not quite so heinous as infectious disease or ink
spilt on the carpet it is still distinctly not a thing to be
encouraged by too great a display of sympathy, and Olive was soon made
to understand that it behoved her to seek some means of livelihood,
some way out into the world.

No proverb is too hackneyed to be comforting at times, and the girl
reminded herself that blood is thicker than water as she looked among
her mother's papers for the Menotti address. They were her cousins,
birds of a feather. She wrote them a queer, shy, charming letter in
strange Italian, laboriously learnt out of a grammar, and then--since
some days must elapse before she could get any answer--she
conscientiously studied the advertisement columns of the papers. She
might be a nursery governess if only she could be sure of herself at
long division, or--horrid alternative--a useful help. Mrs Simons
suggested a shop.

"You have a nice appearance, miss. Perhaps you would do as one of the
young ladies in the drapery department, beginning with the tapes and
thread and ribbon counter, you know, and working your way up to the
showroom."

But Olive altogether declined to be a young lady.

She waited anxiously for her cousins' letter, and it meant so much to
her that when it came she was half afraid to open it.

It was grotesquely addressed to the

    Genteel Miss Agar Olive,
            Marsden Street, 159,
                Brighton,
              Provincia di Sussex,
                    Inghilterra.

The post-mark was Siena. It was stamped on the flap, which was also
decorated with a blue bird carrying a rose in its beak, and was rather
strongly scented.

    "DEAR COUSIN,--We were so pleased and interested to hear
    from you, though we greatly regret to have the news of
    our aunt's death. Our father's sister lives with us
    since we are orphans. She is a widow and has no children
    of her own. If you can pay us fifteen lire a week we
    shall be satisfied, and we will try to get you pupils
    for English. Kindly let us know the date and hour of
    your arrival.--Believe us, yours devotedly,

                    "MARIA, GEMMA and CARMELA."

Olive read it carefully twice over, and then sat down at the table and
began to scribble on the back of the envelope. She convinced herself
that three times fifteen was forty-five, and that so many lire
amounted to not quite two pounds. Then there was the fare out to be
reckoned. Finally, she decided that she would be able to get out to
Italy and to live there for three weeks before she need call herself
penniless.

She went to the window and stood for a while looking out. The houses
opposite and all down the road were exactly alike, all featureless and
grey, roofed with slate, three-storied, with basement kitchens. Nearly
every one of them had "Apartments" in gilt letters on the fanlight
over the front door. It was raining. The pavements were wet and there
was mud on the roadway. The woman who lived in the corner house was
spring-cleaning. Olive saw her helping the servant to take down the
curtains in the front room. Dust and tea-leaves and last year's
cobwebs. It occurred to her that spring would bring a recurrence of
these things only if she became a useful help, as she must if she
stayed in England and earned her living as best she could--only these
and nothing more. The idea was horrible and she shuddered at it. "I
shall go," she said aloud. "I shall go."




CHAPTER II


Olive, advised by a clerk in Cook's office, had taken a through ticket
to Siena, third class to Dover, first on the boat, second in France
and Italy. She got to Victoria in good time, had her luggage labelled,
secured a corner seat, and, having twenty minutes to spare, strolled
round the bookstall, eyeing the illustrated weeklies and the cheap
reprints. The blue and gold of a shilling edition of Keats lay ready
to her hand and she picked it up and opened it.

The girl, true lover of all beauty, flushed with pleasure at the dear,
familiar word music, the sound of Arcadian pipes heard faintly for a
moment above the harsh roar of London. For her the dead poet's voice
rose clearly through the clamour of the living; it was like the silver
wailing of a violin in a blaring discord of brass instruments.

She laid down the book reluctantly, and turning, met the eager eyes of
the man who stood beside her. He had just bought an armful of current
literature, and his business at the bookstall was evidently done, yet
he lingered for an appreciable instant. He, too, was a lover of
beauty, and in his heart he was saying, "Oh, English rose!"

He did not look English himself. He wore his black hair rather longer
than is usual in this country, and there was a curiously vivid look, a
suggestion of fire about him, which is conspicuously lacking in the
average Briton, whose ambition it is to look as cool as possible. His
face was thin and his eyes were deep set, like those of Julius
Caesar--in fact, the girl was strongly reminded of the emperor's bust
in the British Museum. He looked about thirty-five, but might have
been older.

All this Olive saw in the brief instant during which they stood there
together and aware of each other. When he turned away she bought some
magazines, without any great regard for their interest or suitability,
and went to take her place in the third-class compartment she had
selected.

He would travel first, of course. She watched his leisurely progress
along the platform, and noted that he was taller than any of the other
men there, and better-looking. His thin, clean-shaven face compelled
attention; she saw some women looking at him, and was pleased to
observe that he did not even glance at them. Then people came hurrying
up to the door of her compartment to say good-bye to some of her
fellow-travellers, and she lost sight of him.

The train started and passed through the arid wilderness of backyards
that lies between each one of the London termini and the clean green
country.

Olive fluttered the pages of her magazine, but she felt disinclined
to read. She was pretty; her brown hair framed a rose-tinted face, her
smile was charming, her blue eyes were gay and honest and kind. Men
often looked at her, and it cannot be denied that the swift
appraisement of masculine eyes, the momentary homage of a glance that
said "you are fair," meant something to her. Such tributes to her
beauty were minor joys, to be classed with the pleasure to be derived
from _marrons glaces_ or the scent of violets, but the remembrance of
them did not often make her dream by day or bring a flush to her
cheeks.

She roused herself presently and began to look out of the window with
the remorseful feeling of one who has been neglecting an old friend
for an acquaintance. After all, this was England, where she was born
and where her mother had died, and she was leaving it perhaps for
ever. She tried to fix the varying aspects of the spring in her mind
for future reference; the tender green of the young larches in the
plantation, the pale gold of the primroses, and the flowering gorse
close to the line, the square grey towers of the village churches,
even the cold, pinched faces of the people waiting on the platforms of
the little stations. Italy would be otherwise, and she might never see
these familiar things again.

When the train rushed out on to the pier at Dover she dared not look
back at the white cliffs, but kept her eyes resolutely seaward. The
wind was high, and she heard that the crossing would be rough. Caesar
was close behind her, and she caught a glimpse of him going aft as she
made her way to the ladies' cabin.

She lay down on one of the red velvet divans in the stuffy saloon, and
closed her eyes as she had been advised to do, and in ten minutes her
misery was complete.

"If you are going to be ill nothing will stop you," observed the
sympathetic stewardess. "It is like Monte Carlo. Most people have a
system, and sometimes they win, but they are bound to lose in the end.
Champagne, munching biscuits, patent medicines, lying down as you are
now. It is all vanity and vexation of spirit, my dear."

Olive joined feebly in her laugh. "I feel better now. Are we nearly
there?"

"Just coming into harbour."

"Thank heaven!"

When Olive crawled up on deck her one idea, after her luggage, was to
avoid anyone who had seemed to admire her. She could not bear that the
man should see her green face, and she was grateful to him for keeping
his distance in the crush to get off the boat, and for disappearing
altogether in the station. A porter in a blue linen blouse piloted her
to the waiting train, and she climbed into the compartment labelled
"Turin," and settled herself in a window seat.

The country between Calais and Paris can only be described as flat,
stale and unprofitable by a beauty lover panting for the light and
glow and colour of the South, and Olive soon got a book out of her bag
and began to read. Her only fellow-passenger, a middle-aged English
lady with an indefinite face, spoke to her presently. "You are reading
a French novel?"

"No, it is in Italian. _La Citta Morta_, by Gabriele D'Annunzio. I
want to rub up my few words of the language."

"Is he not a very terrible writer?"

Olive was so tired of the disapproving note. "He writes very well, and
his descriptions are gorgeous. Of course he is horrid sometimes, but
one can skip those parts."

"Do you?"

Olive smiled. "No, I do not," she said frankly, "but I don't enjoy
them. They make me tired of life."

"Is not that rather a pity?"

"Perhaps; but you have to sift dirt to find diamonds, don't you? And
this man says things that are worth tiaras sometimes."

"Surely there must be Italian authors who write books suitable for
young people in a pretty style?"

"A pretty style? No doubt. But I don't read them."

The older woman sighed, and then smiled quite pleasantly. "I suppose
you are clever. One of my nieces is, and they find her rather a
handful. Will you try one of my sandwiches?"

Olive produced her biscuits and bananas, and they munched together in
amity. After all, an aunt might be worse than stupid, and this one was
quite good-natured, and so kind that her taste in literature might be
excused. There were affectionate farewells at the Paris station, where
she got out with all her accumulation of bags and bundles.

The train rushed on through the woods of Fontainebleau and across wide
plains intersected by poplar-fringed canals. As the evening mists rose
lights began to twinkle in cottage windows, and in the villages the
church bells were ringing the prayer to the Virgin. Olive had laid
aside her book some time since, and now, wearying of the grey twilit
world, she fell asleep.

Jean Avenel, too, had watched the waning of the day from his place in
a smoking first for a while, before he got up and began to prowl
restlessly about the corridors. "She will be so tired if she does not
eat," he said to himself. "They ought not to let a child like that
travel alone. I wonder--" He walked down the corridor again, but this
time he looked into each compartment. He saw three Englishmen and an
American playing whist, Germans eating, and French people sleeping,
and at last he came upon his rose. A small man, mean-featured and
scrubby-haired, was seated opposite to her, and his shining eyes were
fixed upon her face. She had taken off her hat and was holding it on
her lap, and Jean saw that she was clutching at it nervously, and
that she was pale. He understood that it was probably her first
experience of the Italian stare, deliberate, merciless, and
indefinitely prolonged. She flushed as he came forward, and her eyes
were eloquent as they met his. He sat down beside her.

"Please forgive me," he said quietly, "but I can see this man is
annoying you. Shall I glare him out of the place? I can."

"Oh, please do," she answered. "He has frightened me so. He was
talking before you came."

The culprit already looked disconcerted and rather foolish, and now,
as Jean leant forward and seemed about to speak to him, he began to be
frightened. He fidgeted, thrusting his hands in his pockets, looking
out of the window, humming a tune. His ears grew red. He tried to meet
the other man's level gaze and failed. He got up rather hurriedly. The
brown eyes watched him slinking out before they allowed themselves a
second sight of the rose.

"Thank you so much," said Olive. "I feel as if you had killed a spider
for me, or an earwig. He was more like an earwig. He must have come in
here while I was asleep."

"A deported waiter going back to his native Naples, I imagine," Jean
said. "They ought not to have let you travel alone."

She smiled. "I am a law unto myself."

"That is a pity. Will you think me very impertinent if I confess that
I have been watching over you--at a respectful distance--ever since we
left Victoria? I do not approve of children wandering--"

She tilted her pretty chin at him. "Children! So you have made
yourself into a sort of G.F.S. for me?"

"You know," he said gravely, "we have a mutual friend." He drew a blue
and gold volume from an inner pocket.

Olive flushed scarlet, but she only said, "Oh, Keats!"

She looked at his hands as they turned the pages; they were clever and
kind, she thought, and she wondered if he was an artist or a doctor.
Those fingers might set a butterfly's wing, and yet they seemed very
strong. She did not know she had sighed until he said, "Am I boring
you?"

"Oh, no," she answered eagerly. "Please don't go yet unless you want
to. But tell me why you bought that book?"

"If you could have seen yourself as I saw you, you would understand,"
he answered. "I once saw a woman on my brother's estate pick up a
piece of gold on the road. She had never had so much money without
earning it in her life before, I suppose. At any rate she kissed it,
and her face was radiant. She was old and ugly and worn by her long
days of toil in the fields, and you-- Well, in spite of the
differences you reminded me of her, and I am curious to know which
poem of Keats brought that swift, rapt light of joy."

"It was 'White hawthorn and the pastoral eglantine'--"

Jean found the place and marked the passage before returning the book
to his pocket. "Now," he said, "you will come with me and have some
dinner."




CHAPTER III


Many women are shepherded through all life's journeyings by their
men--fathers, brothers, husbands--who look out their trains for them,
put them in the care of guards, and shield them from all contact with
sulky porters and extortionate cabmen. Olive, who had always to take
her own ticket and fight her own and her mother's battles, now tasted
the joys of irresponsibility with Avenel. He compounded with Customs
officials, who bowed low before him, he took part in the midnight
scramble for pillows at Modane, emerging from the crowd in triumph
with no less than three of the coveted aids to repose under his arm,
and he saw Olive comfortably settled in another compartment with two
motherly German women, and there left her.

At Turin he secured places in the _diretto_ to Florence, and sent his
man to the buffet for coffee and rolls, and the two broke their fast
together.

"Italy and the joy of life," Olive said lightly, as she lifted her
cup, and he looked at her with melancholy brown eyes that yet held the
ghost of a smile.

"The passing hour," he answered; adding prosaically, "This is good
coffee."

Referring to the grey silvery trees whose name she bore he assured
her that he did not think she resembled them. "They are old and you
seem eternally young. You should have been called Primavera."

She laughed. "Ah, if you had been my godfather--"

"I should not have cared to have held you in my arms when you were a
bald-headed baby," he answered with perfect gravity.

Apparently he always said what he thought, but his frankness was
disconcerting, and Olive changed the subject.

"Is Siena beautiful?"

"It is a gem of the Renaissance, and you will love it as I do, I know,
but I wish you could have seen Florence first. My brother has a villa
at Settignano and I am going there now. The fruit trees in the orchard
will be all white with blossom. You remember Romeo's April oath: 'By
yonder moon that tips with silver all these fruit-tree tops--'"

They lunched in the station restaurant at Genoa, and there he bought
the girl a basket of fruit. "A poor substitute for the tea you will be
wanting presently," he explained. "You have no tea-basket with you?
You will want one if you are going to live with Italians."

"I never thought of it."

"May I send you one?" he asked eagerly. "Do let me."

Olive flushed with pleasure. No one had been so kind to her since her
mother died. Evidently he liked her--oh! he liked her very much. She
suddenly realised how much she would miss him when they parted at
Florence and she had to go on alone. It had been so good to be with
someone stronger than herself who would take care of her. He had
seemed happy too, and she thought he looked younger now than he did
when she first saw him standing by the bookstall at Victoria station.

"It is very good of you," she said. "I should like it. Thank you. I--I
shall be sorry to say good-bye."

He met her wistful eyes gravely. "I should like you to know that I
shall never forget this day," he said. "I shall never cease to be
grateful to you for being so--for being what you are. My wife is
different."

"Your wife--"

"I don't live with her."

He took a card from his case presently and scribbled an address on it.
"I dare not hope that I shall ever hear from you again, but that is my
name, and letters will always be forwarded to me from my brother's
place. If ever I could do anything--"

She faltered some word of thanks in an uncertain voice. She felt as if
something had come upon her for which she was unprepared, some shadow
of the world's pain, some flame of its fires that flickered at her
heart for a moment and was gone. She was suddenly afraid, not of the
brown eyes that were fixed so hungrily upon her face, but of herself.
She could hear the beating of her own heart. The pity of it--the pity
of it! He was so nice. Why could not they be friends--

The night had fallen long since and they were nearing Florence.

"Don't forget to change at Empoli," he said. "I will send my man on as
far as that to look after you. Will you let me kiss you?"

"Yes."

He came over and sat on the seat by her side. "Don't be afraid. I
won't hurt you," he said gently, and then, seeing her pale, he drew
back. "No, I won't. It would not be fair. Oh, I beg your pardon! It
will be enough for me to remember how good you were."

The train passed into the lighted station, and he stood up and took
his hat and coat from the rack before he turned to her once more.

"Good-bye."




CHAPTER IV


"Has anyone seen our cousin?" asked Gemma as she helped herself to
_spaghetti_.

Her aunt shrugged her fat shoulders. "No! The _donna di servizio_ is
mistress here, and she has ordained that the cousin shall not be
disturbed. She has even locked the door, and she carries the key in
her pocket."

"It is true," old Carolina said placidly. She was accustomed to join
in the conversation at table when she chose, and Italian servants are
allowed great freedom of speech. "You were all in your beds when
Giovanni Scampo drove her here in his cab this morning or you would
have seen her then. The poor child is half dead with fatigue. Let her
sleep, I say. There are veal cutlets to come, Signorina Maria; will
you have more _spaghetti_?"

"A little more."

The old woman shook her head. "You eat too much."

The Menotti lived in a small stuffy flat on the third floor of 25,
Piazza Tolomei. It had the one advantage of being central, but was
otherwise extremely inconvenient. The kitchen was hot and airless, and
the servant had to sleep in a dark cupboard adjoining, in an
atmosphere compounded of the scent of cheese, black beetles and old
boots. There were four bedrooms besides, all opening on to the
dining-room; and a tiny drawing-room, seldom used and never dusted,
was filled to overflowing with gilt furniture and decorative fantasies
in wool work.

The Menotti did not entertain. They met their friends at church, or at
the theatre, or in the Lizza gardens, where they walked every evening
in the summer. No man had ever seen them other than well dressed, but
in the house they wore loose white cotton jackets and old skirts. They
were _en deshabille_ now, though their heads were elaborately dressed
and their faces powdered, and Maria's waist was considerably larger
than it appeared to be when she was socially "visible."

"I must breathe sometimes," she said.

The three girls were inclined to stoutness, but Gemma drank vinegar
and ate sparingly, and so had succeeded in keeping herself slim
hitherto, though she was only three years younger than Maria, who was
twenty-nine and looked forty.

Carmela was podgy, but she might lace or not just as she pleased. No
one would look at her in any case since her kind, good-humoured, silly
face was marked with smallpox.

Gemma was the pride of her aunt and the hope of the family. The girls
were poor, and it is hard for such to find husbands, but she had
recently become engaged to a young lawyer from Lucca, who had been
staying with friends in Siena when he saw and fell in love with the
girl whom the students at the University named the "Odalisque."

Hers was the strange, boding loveliness of a pale orchid. She had no
colour, but her curved lips were faintly pink, as were the palms of
her soft, idle hands. "I shall be glad when she is married," her aunt
said often. "It is very well for Maria or Carmela to go through the
streets alone, but Gemma is otherwise, and I cannot be always running
after her. Then her temper... _Dio mio!_"

"Perhaps it is the vinegar," suggested Carolina rather spitefully.

"No. She wants a husband."

When the dinner was over Signora Carosi went to her room to lie down,
and her two elder nieces followed her example, but Carmela passed into
the kitchen with Carolina.

"You will let me see the cousin," she said, wheedling. "Gemma thinks
she will be ugly, with great teeth and a red face like the
Englishwomen in the Asino, but I do not believe it."

"If the signorina is hoping for a miracle of plainness she will be
unpleasantly surprised," said the old woman, and her shrivelled face
was as mischievous as a monkey's as she drew the key of Olive's room
from her pocket. "I am going to take her some soup now, and you shall
come with me."

It is quite impossible to be retiring, or even modest, in the
mid-Victorian sense, in flats. A bedroom cannot remain an inviolate
sanctuary when it affords the only means of access to the bathroom or
is a short cut to the kitchen. Olive had had some experience of
suburban flats during holidays spent with school friends, and had
suffered the familiarity that breeds weariness in such close quarters.
As she woke now she was unpleasantly aware of strangers in the room.

"Only a lover or a nurse may look at a woman while she sleeps without
offence," she said drowsily. "It is an unpardonable liberty in all
other classes of the population. Are you swains, or sisters of mercy?"
She opened her eyes and met Carmela's puzzled stare with laughter. "I
was saying that when one is ill or in love one can endure many
things," she explained in halting Italian.

"Ah," Carmela said uncomprehendingly, "I am never ill, _grazia a Dio_,
but when Maria has an indigestion she is cross, and when Gemma is in
love her temper is dreadful. Perhaps, being a foreigner, you are
different. Are you tired?"

"Yes, I