THE Signore Americano, musing over his morning coffee on the Villa terrace, gazed intently into the distance where Florence lay invisible behind the hills.

“Buon’ giorno, Signore!” called Oreste, reining in Elisabetta and lifting his cap with a smile.

“Buon’ giorno!” returned the Signore, starting. “Ah, you are going to the city, and I wanted to go myself!”

Oreste looked troubled.

“Signore,—how much I am sorry! It displeases me, but I am already promised to my patron. When one is poor, one must think of the francs for the family,” he added apologetically.

The Signore, who knew no such necessity, frowned.

“This is the fifth time this Carnivale—and you just married! If I had a sposina—”

“The Signore’s sposina would lack for nothing,” smiled Oreste. “We others,—we must do as we can. As for Gioja, she goes to pass the day with her nonna at Vincigliata. I will bring the Signore’s mail as usual.”

The Signore waved his hand impatiently, and knocked the ashes from his cigarette, then, as the shabby cab, with Elisabetta pulling heroically back against the steepness, wound from sight, his glance softened. It was a piece of fortune surely for a Vignola cabman to have a city patron. Fortunes were not to be made up here where nobody but the forestieri, who came from time to time to make a villegiatura in one or another of the villas, would think of wasting francs for the sole purpose of getting somewhere. The inhabitants stayed where they found themselves placed by Providence. To all intents, Vignola might be a hundred miles from Florence instead of a bare six. Besides, a stranger Signore passes with the season, but a city patron remains. Nuisance as it was to have his own plans conflicted with, the Signore forgave Oreste.

Fifteen minutes later this melting mood congealed again, as a slender figure stole quietly down the Way.

It was Gioja, walking with her usual listless grace.

Her small head, its crisply waved Tuscan hair bound with a kerchief of dull blue, was carried far back as no kerchiefed head has a right to be; and her eyes, blue as the kerchief but not dull, looked straight ahead, dilated and musing. She did not see the Signore,—a thing that could have befallen no other girl in the village, unless it were blind Chiara, and the Signore watched her go with a frown,—for this was not the direction of Vincigliata. And why was she starting so early, unless to defeat the glances with which all these closed doors would soon be alive?

Yet he continued to watch her. There were other girls in the village just as pretty. Many a strain of noble blood had gone to the making of these Vignolese peasants. This was not the first girl the Signore had seen who looked as if—change her gown and tie a bonnet over her hair—she might loll in her carriage of an afternoon at the Cascine with the best of the fine ladies in the city below. But there was no other whom the Signore ever leaned over the wall to look after. And as he leaned his frown deepened; he was sorry for Oreste; but—marry a girl like that and leave her alone, in Italy! Anybody might foresee the end. And he frowned again, not at Gioja this time, who had disappeared from view, but at a mental image, wearing, it is true, an air dangerously like that of Oreste’s sposa.

Yes, indeed, anybody might foretell the end. That was what the whole community, already buzzing with the scandal, said. And it was exactly what the Padre said when, five minutes later, he came up the path and sank upon the marble seat, mopping his brow beneath the beaver hat.

“I have been to Oreste’s,” he said apologetically, “and thought I would look in upon the Signore in passing. There was nobody there.”

The Signore, engaged in pouring red wine for his guest, made no response, and the priest stole a troubled glance at him as he took the glass from his hand.

“Perhaps, Signore, you may have seen them pass, and can tell me if that child went with her husband?”

“No,” said the Signore, after a minute’s deliberation, “I could not.”

His guest sighed as he sipped the wine. He had grown gray in the service of the village. He had known Gioja from her babyhood. His was the hand which had held and oiled and dipped her at the font, and had led her from then until her present estate; and he, if any one, had a right to borrow trouble, seeing that all troubles were brought to him in the end. His fine, thin lips shut above the wineglass in the sensitive line which marks the better of Rome’s two types. His soul was straight and simple. The one vanity it owned was to be on terms of companionship with the occupant of the big villa. The half hour on its terrace or in its salotto formed his social dissipation, and dearly did he prize the importance it gave him in the eyes of his flock. Nay, it gave importance to the whole community.

“Not every village has a priest like ours,” said the gossips, complacently, “that a so-educated stranger Signore would make so much of.”

Moreover, if his people were poor, God alone knows how poor their priest was, and the Signore possessed a fine taste in wines,—true Chianti, a very different thing from vino rosso at eighty centesimi the flask,—while his lavishness was that of his country.

As for the Signore, he would pour the oil from a fresh flask any time to unseal the lips pressed together as now over the case of Oreste’s sposa.

“The truth is,” sighed the priest, “the end is too easy to foresee. The child is not like others; and there is nothing worse than that. That’s what Luigi’s sposa said yesterday when I rebuked her for thinking evil, and recalled to her how Gioja helped nurse her three through the fever only last spring. ‘Oh, I’m not saying she has n’t a heart,’ said Luigi’s sposa; ‘but you can’t deny that all is not right when a girl is different from all the rest; it is better to have less heart and be more like one’s neighbors.’ And Luigi’s wife had reason. Nothing is worse than to be different from all the folk about you. When I had her safely married, I thought indeed there would be an end of trouble;—Heaven grant it do not prove a beginning!”

“Does she not love her husband?”

“Who can tell?” sighed the priest, impatiently. “Oreste is not one to set the Arno afire, but he is a good lad. But about her he is a mule,—a very mule. Would you believe, Signore, when I ventured a word,—I, whose duty it is,—he flared up like a Befana torch,—he whose manner to me ordinarily is a lesson to the community!”

The Signore smiled and reflected upon the strength of man.

“One would say I had spoken ill of the Saints,” continued the exasperated priest. “And the thing is becoming insufferable,—such a tale of scandal as some one whispers to me every day. One would think she has neither eyes nor ears, and cares not whether she has friends or foes for neighbors.” There is, in truth, no such broad and flowery path to unpopularity as this which Gioja undeviatingly pursued. Nobody who elects to be unlike his neighbors gets social good of it. Had not the Signore himself seen?

Bad enough it was to have her sitting wide-eyed and absolutely indifferent at her machine, and so pretty that one could see the youths looking at her when they pretended not to; or mooning over her straw work with never a word of gossip or a little story about a friend, more than if they were all stones: but what did these absences all by herself mean, which looked the worse now that she was a decent man’s wife? It was an absolute scandal—which is only another name for a godsend sometimes—to a sober community.

Oreste might pretend to shut his eyes,—he had always been a fool about her; but it could not be asked that all the village should do the same, especially those girls who would have made decent wives if any one had given them the chance, and those lads who would have known how to keep a wife in order if they had taken one.

The priest, thinking of these things, sighed. He, too, might affect blindness; but he would need to be stone deaf as well to escape hearing what every tongue in the village felt it a duty and a privilege to confide to him daily.

“It must be admitted that the Signorina Americana has something to answer for,” the priest wound up, as he invariably did, and always with an indulgent accent which forgave while it accused.

The Signorina Americana!—how many times was she not levelled at the ears of the Signore Americano who had inherited her tradition with the villa of which he was the next lessee. If the contadini were to be believed, there was little for which she might not be held accountable. They spoke of her smilingly, Oreste tenderly, the priest indulgently (the Signorina also had possessed a generous taste in wines), and Gioja not at all. Yet apparently it was precisely Gioja who might have had most to say.

“Ah, yes; if I could have foreseen when I brought that child to her! But what harm could come to her from earning a few francs as the Signo-rina’s maid? I chose her for the very reason that she had more gentleness and was more educated than the others,—the Signorina, your countrywoman, was herself very educated and full of gentilezza. But she was too good to Gioja, and then she could never be made to see. She had a way with her,—when I began to remonstrate with her she would fill up my glass and ask about my poor, and, before I knew it—altro! she was very generous, your countrywoman. But if there are many like her in your country it must be a terrible place; a man would not possess his own soul.”

The Signore laughed.

“She would sit here—precisely where I sit now—and smile a little smile she had, and twist this rose-vine about her fingers, and just so she twisted us all. Ah,” he concluded, lifting his glass, “she was truly terrible, that Signorina; but simpatica, altro! never have I seen so simpatica a signorina.”

Simpatica! When you are that, there is nothing else you can be; and when you are not that, nothing that you can be is of any use. When everybody, down to the newsboys and cab-openers, loves you and doesn’t know why,—you are simpatica; when people would rather do things for you than not, and don’t care about the payment,—then you may be sure you are simpatica; when the expression of their eyes and the tones of their voices change insensibly when they look at and speak to you,—there is no room to doubt that you are simpatica. You may not be rich, nor beautiful, nor “educated” (such a very different thing from book-fed), but you do not need to be. Simpatica is the comprehending sky of praise in which separate stars of admiration are swallowed up.

While the Signore figured rapidly the mischief possible of accomplishment by a dangerous Signorina possessing this attribute, the priest drank another glass of wine and returned to the trouble of his soul.

“I thought, indeed, with a wife’s work to do, she would settle down like others; but Oreste encourages her wilfulness.”

“Why do you not speak to Gioja herself?”

“Heaven forbid!” exclaimed the priest, crossing himself. “I have tried that once. She has a terrible nature,—that child! I have never told any one; but see if I have not reason to say so, Signore.” He sipped his wine agitatedly, and then began with feeling:—

“It was the Signorina to begin with; she saw that the child was pretty, and she put ideas in her head. And in fact, though Heaven forbid I should compare Gioja, who is only a little contadina. with a real Signorina, yet she has always seemed to me to have a little something about her which recalls the Signorina herself,—a way of walking and carrying her head. And the Signorina had not an idea of keeping her in her place. She was always giving her gowns and ribbons and trinkets and vanities of all kinds,—that was her way, always giving. The end of it was that one day I surprised that child with a hat of the Signorina’s on her unhappy head; yes, actually, Signore, if you will credit me, a hat,—a cappello di signora on her head!” He spread his hands in deprecating despair.

The Signore looked blankly.

“Oh, Signore, you are like your countrywoman; it is impossible to make you understand! But it must be a country,—yours! For a girl like Gioja to put a hat on is to declare herself without shame at once. Honest girls of her class let such roba di signore alone; yes, and rightly, for God has put people in their places. A girl who showed herself in a signora’s hat would find it impossible to live in Vignola; she would be hooted out of the village. And as for the wife of a lad like Oreste pretending to that,—half-a-dozen lovers would not be a worse scandal. Those at least the others could understand, but a cappello di signora—” He stopped to take several agitated sips, shaking his head all the time. “I do not say she would have been so mad as to cross the threshold in it (the Signorina had given it to her to sell for the feathers upon it); but who could tell what such a girl might do? I scolded her well for her wicked vanity, and such ideas above her place. Santa Maria!—lovers and such are enough, without a scandal like that among my people.

“Well, what was the end? Signore, she rushed off and hung that hat, with at least twenty francs’ worth of good feathers on it, in the Madonna’s chapel, beside ‘Maso’s crutch and the little hearts and legs and other offerings to Our Lady! There it hung, where all the world would see it, and every tongue in the place be set wagging, if I had not providentially gone in and found it before Mass next day. And even then what could I do? It was the Madonna’s, and I dared not remove it. But Heaven sends accidents, and as it chanced, providentially, Signore, my candle brushed the feathers in passing and, presto, I dropped it quickly into a bucket of water. It was not fit for Our Lady after that, so I took it away, and I myself made it up to her in candles, that no one might feel hurt. And after all nobody was the richer for all those francs’ worth of feathers; they were singed more than I hoped, and did not bring me in Florence the price of the candles. Oh, she has a terrible nature,—that Gioja! No, no, grazie,—if I must speak to Oreste, I must; but to her!—candles cost, Signore, and I am a poor man.”

Still shaking his head, he rose to depart.

The Signore, left alone, paced the terrace a few times, smiling to himself; then he sat down again,—this time in the priest’s place,—and fell to musing, and as he mused his fingers stole almost furtively to the long rose-tendrils, and twisted them gently, while the smile died abruptly on his lips.

Presently he rang, and Giuseppina came out.

“You may take away these things,” said the Signore, “and bring me pen and paper. Oh, and by the way, Giuseppina, in future put my seat here,—the valley sees itself better.”

Coming from the post that evening the Signore was aware of a slender shape slipping along through the deepening shadows ahead. Quickening his steps, he overtook it easily.

“Buon sera; so it is you, Gioja?”

“Si, Signore!”—the voice was both startled and appealing.

But the Signore strode along looking keenly at the downcast face.

“Oreste is not with you?”

“No, Signore; he went to the city.”

“And you have doubtless been visiting your nonna?”

“Yes, Signore,”—the voice was almost inaudible.

The Signore turned on his heel, with a curt “Buona sera!” and was still muttering things under his breath when, fifteen minutes later, he beheld from the terrace Oreste and Elisabetta toiling wearily up the hill.

“How well she times it,” he thought contemptuously, as the bell of the big gate sounded, and he heard Giuseppina’s challenge: “Who is it?”

“Amici, friends,” answered Oreste’s voice, and Oreste swiftly followed, with his frank smile and a square envelope of dull blue, which the Signore’s hand involuntarily stretched to grasp.

“Ecco, Signore,—the only one!” said Oreste, with that polite gesture of regret with which he daily accompanied this small comedy. The Signore having possessed himself of the letter avidly, put it into his pocket with ostentatious carelessness and coolly lighted a cigarette. Oreste smiled comprehendingly but respectfully.

“You have had a long day of it?”

“Yes, Signore,” Oreste smiled with the satisfied air of one who has done a good day’s work.

“I suppose you have made a handful of money,” continued the Signore, severely.

Oreste shrugged his shoulders. “Not great things,—but, altro, I am content.”

The Signore shrugged in his turn. “Each to his own mind. Your sposina has also made a long day; I saw her just now.”

“Ah, yes; it is a long way to Vincigliata, when one must walk. The Signore’s commands?”

“None.”

Truly, the Signorina Americana, if this was her work, had small reason to be proud of it. The Signore’s frown enveloped even the blue envelope, at which he stood staring long after Oreste had left the room.

And so it ran through the spring months,—the mournfully beautiful Tuscan spring. The nightingales in the villa gardens sang and sang, at dusk, in the moonlight, and at dawn, and the fireflies glittered all through the darkness up and down the olive slopes. An intenser life quickened in the little community as the summer stirred in the veins of her children. The youths went singing up and down the hills, and the girls and women lingered over their water jars at the fountain in the square. For what is it to be poor in the summer time?

Sometimes the Signore, lying awake at night, heard Oreste’s mellow voice as he passed by to the little house. But through all this gayety of being Gioja stole silently and dreamily, and the whisper of turned heads and eyes askance followed her. For there were the ever-recurring festas, when Oreste went to the city, and where then did Oreste’s sposa go? That is what the community would like to know; for the tale of her grandmother was quite too large for the village throat. She kept her secret well,—yes; but there is only one kind of a secret possible to the Italian mind.

“Birbone!” said the women, with contempt of Oreste, while the men laughed and shrugged their shoulders. Oreste had caught a pretty sposa who had thought herself much too good for them, but, ma chÈ,—he was paying for it.

It was impossible that the public curiosity should content itself with being curious. Maria, one of those public-minded souls which never lack in any community, toiled all the way over to Vincigliata, and brought back personal assurance from the nonna herself that that pious granddaughter had not been seen in Vincigliata all these months.

“Eight good miles I trudged in all that sun, and a day’s work lost,” declared Maria, mopping her brow in the midst of an excited and sympathetic group. “If my legs ache! But for the good of the community I did it; and what I know to-night the priest shall know before morning. I made haste to go to-day, for to-morrow, being the festa of our Saint John, Oreste goes to the city, and that civetta—”

And nobody could say but that Maria had done well, and the girl deserved whatever might come of it.

But when the priest, sad-eyed and stern, knocked at the door of the little house in the early morning after Mass, no one was there. Having delivered a vain fusillade, to the accompaniment of many suggestions offered from the neighbors’ windows, the priest turned away and betook himself, with a clouded brow, to the Signore, who had invited him, by Oreste, to breakfast with him that morning. He was waiting for him now on the terrace with a morning countenance; and the breakfast-table, heaped with roses, wore a festal air which did not escape the priest, preoccupied though he was.

“You also are keeping a feast, Signore, to appearances?”

“Yes.”

“Ah, indeed! a festa Americana?”

“No, my own. And now what is it about these two? Oreste, I know, went to the city. I tried to engage him, but he was pre-engaged to that patron of his. And Gioja,—well, I saw her pass a little later.”

“While we were in the church,—the guilty child!” said the priest, sternly. “But where can she have gone?” he added, sighing. “I have been much to blame; I have been too negligent; I should have dealt with her from the first. Culpa mia!” He crossed himself and looked so discouraged that the Signore was touched.

“Listen, amico mio,” he said. “As you say, it is a bad business; and, arrange it how you will, it will never be well that those two shall live here. The last of it will never be heard,—if I know your people. I am going away to Livorno next week, and I have asked Oreste to go with me. I like the fellow, and away from here she may come to her senses. She is young, and, guilty though she may be, she does not seem case-hardened.”

“Going away!” exclaimed the startled priest, in dismay. “And going to take those two away from their own country,—to a foreign place! What an idea,—but what an idea!”

“Scarcely foreign; it is only the other side of Florence.”

“Ah, ah! to you, but to us villagers! It is not a little thing to leave one’s home, where one has been born and bred, and knows his neighbors, after all, whether they be good or bad. It is a great thing to know one’s neighbors. And to go so far!—but they will think twice before they say ‘Yes.’”

“On the contrary, Oreste goes willingly. I do not think he is so blind; he knows well they are not friendly to his sposa here.”

“And Gioja,” said the startled priest, “will she go?”

“He says so.”

The priest drew a long breath, half relief, half regret, and wholly wonder.

“Well, well, it is perhaps the best that could happen. But to lose two of my flock—and to leave one’s country like that! You are a strange people, you Americans. And what becomes of us without either you or the Signorina Americana here in the villa?”

“There are more Americans,” replied the Signore, smiling; “and who knows but that your Signorina will return to make you more trouble yet?”

The priest shook his head. “The next time she may bring her own maid. Not another girl from our village shall she turn the head of, that Signorina,” and the very tone of his voice as he said it was witness that he affirmed what he knew to be false. The Signore understood and laughed.

“Put it all away, amico mio, for to-day, and go with me to Florence. Gioja has gone; and you can do nothing but listen to your people, who will deafen you before night. Come and see your bella Firenze in her festa dress. We will take a tram below and find a cab at the gates.”

The priest’s face brightened like a child’s.

“Ah, Signore, now it is I you are proposing to carry away! But why not? It is long since I was in Florence, and I have already said service here. But it is not necessary to say anything to my people. Discretion, Signore, discretion is a great thing!”

And thus it happened that when the village folk saw the good father depart in company with the Signore forestiere, they sagely concluded, with that sense of the importance of our own affairs common to the race, that the two had gone to Fiesole, or who knew but even Florence, to consult the authorities in the matter of that unhappy Gioja. And, in point of fact, though the priest was fairly running away from the subject, he was destined to run straight into its arms instead.

Florence was all in festa; and if there is anything lovelier than Florence in festa, who has seen it? The streets ran over with bright sunshine; and the Florentines, reinforced by contadini from all the neighboring towns, in holiday garb, made a bright, shifting mass for the sunbeams to play over. Arno rolled its now shallow stream like muddy gold, and pale golden palaces stood loftily up and looked down at her. Over her streaming Ways, Florence shook the bells in all her towers every fifteen minutes, and at intervals the deep, golden-throated voice in Giotto’s Tower answered with a rich hum, hum-m, hum-m-m, like a melodious summer bee. The strident notes of the grilli, in their little wicker cages, brought from the Cascine at dawn, completed the joyous pandemonium.

The Signore’s spirits ran at higher tide than even the bright tide of humanity about him. He laughed at all; he bought flowers of the boys and girls who ran after the carriage holding up glowing armfuls, until the carriage-seat was heaped, and the priest held up his hands at the extravagance. He climaxed his folly by buying all the remaining grilli in their cages, and letting them loose upon the grass of the Cascine.

“Do not scold, amico mio,” he said to the priest gayly; “I told you it is a festa. I have come into a fortune, and it is written that nobody must be shut up to-day or hungry.” He tossed a handful of soldi to a group of children.

“I am afraid your fortune will not last long,” replied the priest, shaking his head.

But he forgot his own prudence when, a little later, they went to a restaurant,—not Doney’s, where the foolish tourists go, fancying themselves in Italy, and where the priest would have been miserable,—but Gilli’s on the Piazza Signoria. There, it being a feast day, and his host newly come into a fortune, the good father ate, for the honor of religion and his own temporal good, such a meal as had never before found its way to his stomach, and washed it down with glasses of Chianti, not merely old (vecchio), but extravagantly old (stravecchio). Golden moments were these, and he put down his glass at last with a sigh of regret that it was impossible to prolong them further. His limit of possibility was reached.

“Now,” said the Signore, casting an extravagant fee upon the table, “where next?”

“To the Baptistery and the Duomo, my son,” answered the priest, with sudden gravity, crossing himself, “to say our grazie, and put up a little prayer to our good Saint John.”

It was precisely upon emerging from the door of Gilli’s in this comfortable and untroubled frame of mind, arising from the perfect balance of the carnal and the spiritual, that he came face to face with the worst trouble of all. For, straightening his shabby hat and smoothing his shabby cassock, what should his eyes fall upon but Oreste,—Oreste, who, having that moment emerged from a cafÉ below, was assisting a very elegant signora into his cab. Just as he got her safely tucked in, his eye caught the two pairs staring at him. His sturdy face blanched; then, before either could make step forward, he had shut the door, sprung quickly to the seat, and, touching up Elisabetta, with a glance of defiance whirled away. The two left, staring, drew a long breath.

“Ebbene,” remarked the Signore, at last, “so the patron was a padrona; perhaps Gioja has not been so much to blame after all.”

“I will know,” answered the priest, sharply.

The Signore said a word to the nearest cabman, slipping something into his hand, and in a moment they were bowling up the Via Calzaioli. It cost a city cabman nothing to keep Elisabetta in sight; and they drew up in the Piazza del Duomo just in time to see Oreste deferentially assisting his Signora to alight at the Cathedral steps. He saw them and his eyes shot such a glance of stern warning that both men sat stupidly, and the next moment nearly fell over each other as the Signora, in her silks and nodding plumes, swept by,—for, lo, it was Gioja!

In another instant she had swept up the steps and the great doors had swallowed her. Then Oreste’s manner changed. He leaned against the cab-door, and turned upon the two men a regard which said: “And now what have you to say about it?”

There was a decidedly awkward silence while they drew near; then the Signore burst out laughing.

“You have found a fine patron, amico mio!” he said.

“What folly!” ejaculated the priest, holding up his hands and recovering breath at last. “Gran’ Dioy what folly!”

“Reverendo,” replied Oreste, quietly, “perhaps not so much folly as some of you have thought. Perhaps I know what the tongues up there wag like, and if I choose not to mind, whose affair is that? If it pleases us to please ourselves, who is the worse for that?”

“And the scandal!” exclaimed the priest. “And the waste, and the ideas you are putting in Gioja’s head,—the wicked vanity and pride—Oh, I told the Signorina how it would end!”

“As for that, Reverendo, you will pardon me; but tongues must wag when they are hung in the middle, and if they wag about Gioja,—why it does n’t hurt her, and some one else goes safe. And as for the waste,—the price of a fare now and then,—why if it suits us to live on polenta six days, and take our pleasure on the seventh, whose misery is that? I have never yet lacked my soldo for the Church or for a neighbor poorer than I.”

“And the ideas you are encouraging in her unhappy head!—but I will have something to say to that child.”

“Reverendo,” interposed Oreste, sternly, “by your leave,—you are a good man, half a saint, and I am only an ignorant peasant, but there are some things priests and nuns do not understand, and what one does not understand, that one should not meddle with. The Signorina understood; she knew well it was neither pride nor vanity in Gioja, but just a kind of poesia which made her like to play the signora. The Signorina understood because she herself was full of poesia.”

“Oh, the Signorina,—the Signorina!” interjected the priest, in despair.

“She knew,” Oreste went on. “You remember the time of the hat, Reverendo?”

“If I remember!” groaned the priest.

“Ebbene!” said Oreste, emphatically, “when I found it out, I went straight to the Signorina and told her. She was on the terrace, and she sat down and laughed a little. You remember our Signorina’s way of laughing?”

It was to the priest that he addressed this; but it was the Signore, looking straight before him and smiling, who looked as if he remembered.

“Nothing would do,” continued Oreste, “but that she must jump into my cab then and there, with only a lace on her head, and she a Signorina! [here the Signore laughed aloud]—and drive straight to Florence, not to one of the small shops, but to the great milliner’s on Tornabuoni, where she bought a hat,—who knows what it cost?—and she bade me take it to Gioja and tell her to wear it when she liked, for there was nothing wicked about it.”

The priest groaned again.

“Only,” added Oreste, with the suspicion of a twinkle, “she bade us say nothing about it, lest you, Reverendo, might think it your duty to lecture the child again; and it was a pity, she said, to make so good a man uncomfortable. So, as she could not wear it openly, we had to find a way under the plate; and as the whole village would have been talking if we went away together, I had to make that little story of a patron. Once outside of Vignola, I wait for Gioja, and there in the olive grove she makes herself into a signora; and on the way home we stop again, and—the signora’s hat and gown stowed away under my seat—my little sposa climbs up beside me and we talk it all over. And then the next day I count my francs, and the folk call me ‘Birbone;’ and the lads think evil of my Gioja because she would never look at them; and we laugh in our sleeves. What does all that matter when one is happy?”

“And so,” said the priest, sternly, “you let all Vignola think your wife has a lover, and say nothing?”

“They have to think something; and isn’t it better they should think she has a lover, Reverendo, than a cappello di signora?”

“Surely,” assented the priest, quickly; “a lover, at least, they can all understand; and only too many of them—Madonna pardon them!—have had; but a signora’s hat nobody in the village has ever had, and they would never pardon Gioja for having. And they have right; Gioja has no business with a signora’s hat, nor you to waste your time and money, as if you would be bambini all your lives. And for you, a man, to make yourself the servant of your wife,—oh, it is shameful, vergognoso!”

“Pardon again, Reverendo, but that, too, you can’t understand. If it is Gioja’s poesia to play the signora,—why, Gioja is my poesia. As for its lasting, altro! the future is long; and if we had others to feed all that might be different. She is only a child herself now; but when the good God sends a child to a child, that makes a woman of her; He himself sees to that. When that comes, she will care nothing to play the signora with her stupid Oreste. All this our Signorina knew; for that night, when the child came to me weeping, and saying how wicked she had been, and begging me to forgive her and marry her at once, at once—I, Signori, who would have married her any moment for years!—it put me in trouble. I had fear to take her like that, and perhaps have her sorry for it later. But I went to our Signorina with her, and told her all; and she looked at us both and said: ‘Marry her, Oreste; you safely may;’ for the Signorina understood. And so—I married her.”

The eyes of the two young men met suddenly, and exchanged across the gulf of position and race one rapid thrill of comprehension. The priest looked half-timidly at both; but perhaps he, too, comprehended something, for he said meekly,—

“After all, I did no harm.”

“Perhaps not,” replied Oreste, with his frank smile; “but that was not your fault, Reverendo. And now, if the Signore and you will excuse me, that was the bell of the Elevation. If Gioja saw you, she would have no more pleasure; and that would be all the more a pity, because it is our last festa here. We are going to live with the Signore and his Signora. Is n’t it so, Signore?”

“Ah, ah!” exclaimed the priest, with vivacity, “so that was your festa and your fortune, Signore? And that is why you have so much sympathy for even the grills and these foolish children! Well, well, it is perhaps the best that could happen; for it would be impossible to go on giving scandal like this, and if I said a word you would all be for taking my life. It may do for Gioja, who is not like the others; but Heaven forbid the other ragazze should get such ideas in their heads; I have enough to do to keep track of them and their affairs as it is.”

“Signori!” said Oreste, warningly. The two slunk behind the next cab, and from there beheld the stream of life suddenly burst from the big doors of the Duomo,—men and women and children, prince and citizen and peasant, and among them a slender, graceful shape, her cappello di signora sitting well upon the ruffled gold of her hair, and her long skirt raised in one gloved hand with a gesture at which the Signore’s heart beat suddenly faster against the blue envelope above it. So very excellent an imitation of the Signora that even an expert need not blush to be deceived by it.

Oreste stepped forward and flung open the cab-door with ostentation. The Signora mounted languidly, and sank back against the cushions, making a great rustling of silk. The loungers on the Duomo steps stole covert glances at the pretty woman. Then Oreste slammed the door, took off his hat, and approached deferentially.

“Commanda, Signora?” he said, loud enough for everybody to hear.

“Alla casa,—home,” responded the Signora, with superb languor.

And, mounting upon the seat, with a parting glance of mingled triumph and humor in the direction of the two watchers, Oreste, Elisabetta, and the Signora whirled triumphantly away.

The two left upon the sidewalk remained speechless for a few minutes; then the priest’s eye caught his companion’s, deprecatingly, but with an echo of Oreste’s twinkle.

“That Signorina,” he said, with an indulgent sigh, “she has much to answer for!”

But the Signore, looking into the distance and laughing softly to himself, said not a word.