Lucrezia was accustomed to it all. She had been born beside that sea.

Etna had looked down upon her as she sucked and cried, toddled and

played, grew to a lusty girlhood, and on into young womanhood with its

gayety and unreason, its work and hopes and dreams. That Oriental

song--she had sung it often on the mountain-sides, as she set her bare,

brown feet on the warm stones, and lifted her head with a native pride

beneath its burdening pannier or its jar of water from the well. And she

had many a time danced to the tarantella that the shepherd-boy was

fluting, clapping her strong hands and swinging her broad hips, while the

great rings in her ears shook to and fro, and her whole healthy body

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quivered to the spirit of the tune. She knew it all. It was and had

always been part of her life.

Hermione's garden of paradise generally seemed homely enough to Lucrezia.

Yet to-day, perhaps because she was dressed in her best on a day that was

not a festa, and wore a silver chain with a coral charm on it, and had

shoes on her feet, there seemed to her a newness, almost a strangeness in

the wideness and the silence, in the sunshine and the music, something

that made her breathe out a sigh, and stare with almost wondering eyes on

Etna and the sea. She soon lost her vague sensation that her life lay,

perhaps, in a home of magic, however, when she looked again at the mule

track which wound upward from the distant town, in which the train from

Messina must by this time have deposited her forestieri, and began to

think more naturally of the days that lay before her, of her novel and

important duties, and of the unusual sums of money that her activities

were to earn her.

Gaspare, who, as major-domo, had chosen her imperiously for his assistant

and underling in the house of the priest, had informed her that she was

to receive twenty-five lire a month for her services, besides food and

lodging, and plenty of the good, red wine of Amato. To Lucrezia such

wages seemed prodigal. She had never yet earned more than the half of

them. But it was not only this prospect of riches which now moved and

excited her.

She was to live in a splendidly furnished house with wealthy and

distinguished people; she was to sleep in a room all to herself, in a bed

that no one had a right to except herself. This was an experience that in

her most sanguine moments she had never anticipated. All her life had

been passed en famille in the village of Marechiaro, which lay on a

table-land at the foot of Monte Amato, half-way down to the sea. The

Gabbis were numerous, and they all lived in one room, to which cats,

hens, and turkeys resorted with much freedom and in considerable numbers.

Lucrezia had never known, perhaps had never desired, a moment of privacy,

but now she began to awake to the fact that privacy and daintiness and

pretty furniture were very interesting, and even touching, as well as

very phenomenal additions to a young woman's existence. What could the

people who had the power to provide them be like? She scanned the

mule-track with growing eagerness, but the procession did not appear. She

saw only an old contadino in a long woollen cap riding slowly into the

recesses of the hills on a donkey, and a small boy leading his goats to

pasture. The train must have been late. She turned round from the view

and examined her new home once more. Already she knew it by heart, yet

the wonder of it still encompassed her spirit.




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