Suddenly she moved, took her hands from her hips, settled her yellow

handkerchief, and smiled. The silence had been broken by a sound all true

Sicilians love, the buzz and the drowsy wail of the ceramella, the

bagpipes which the shepherds play as they come down from the hills to the

villages when the festival of the Natale is approaching. It was as yet

very faint and distant, coming from the mountain-side behind the cottage,

but Lucrezia knew the tune. It was part of her existence, part of Etna,

the olive groves, the vineyards, and the sea, part of that old, old

Sicily which dwells in the blood and shines in the eyes, and is alive in

the songs and the dances of these children of the sun, and of legends and

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of mingled races from many lands. It was the "Pastorale," and she knew

who was playing it--Sebastiano, the shepherd, who had lived with the

brigands in the forests that look down upon the Isles of Lipari, who now

kept his father's goats among the rocks, and knew every stone and every

cave on Etna, and who had a chest and arms of iron, and legs that no

climbing could fatigue, and whose great, brown fingers, that could break

a man's wrist, drew such delicate tones from the reed pipe that, when he

played it, even the old man's thoughts were turned to dancing and the

old woman's to love. But now he was being important, he was playing the

ceramella, into which no shepherd could pour such a volume of breath as

he, from which none could bring such a volume of warm and lusty music. It

was Sebastiano coming down from the top of Monte Amato to welcome the

forestieri.

The music grew louder, and presently a dog barked outside on the terrace.

Lucrezia ran to the window. A great white-and-yellow, blunt-faced,

pale-eyed dog, his neck surrounded by a spiked collar, stood there

sniffing and looking savage, his feathery tail cocked up pugnaciously

over his back.

"Sebastiano!" called Lucrezia, leaning out of the window under the

awning--"Sebastiano!"

Then she drew back laughing, and squatted down on the floor, concealed by

the window-seat. The sound of the pipes increased till their rough drone

seemed to be in the room, bidding a rustic defiance to its whiteness and

its silence. Still squatting on the floor, Lucrezia called out once more: "Sebastiano!"

Abruptly the tune ceased and the silence returned, emphasized by the

vanished music. Lucrezia scarcely breathed. Her face was flushed, for she

was struggling against an impulse to laugh, which almost overmastered

her. After a minute she heard the dog's short bark again, then a man's

foot shifting on the terrace, then suddenly a noise of breathing above

her head close to her hair. With a little scream she shrank back and

looked up. A man's face was gazing down at her. It was a very brown and

very masculine face, roughened by wind and toughened by sun, with keen,

steady, almost insolent eyes, black and shining, stiff, black hair, that

looked as if it had been crimped, a mustache sprouting above a wide,

slightly animal mouth full of splendid teeth, and a square, brutal, but

very manly chin. On the head was a Sicilian cap, long and hanging down

at the left side. There were ear-rings in the man's large, well-shaped

ears, and over the window-ledge protruded the swollen bladder, like a

dead, bloated monster, from which he had been drawing his antique tune.




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