eese, there's a
good girl."

"All right!" said Goneril.

Madame Petrucci stopped her vocalising. "You shall have all the better a
dinner to compensate you, my Gonerilla!" She smiled sweetly, and then
again became Zerlina.

Goneril cut her lunch, and took it out of doors to share with her
companion, Angiolino. He was harvesting the first corn under the olives,
but at noon it was too hot to work. Sitting still there was, however, a
cool breeze that gently stirred the sharp-edged olive-leaves.

Angiolino lay down at full length and munched his bread and cheese in
perfect happiness. Goneril kept shifting about to get herself into the
narrow shadow cast by the split and writhen trunk.

"How aggravating it is!" she cried. "In England, where there's no sun,
there's plenty of shade--and here, where the sun is like a
mustard-plaster on one's back, the leaves are all set edgewise on
purpose that they shan't cast any shadow!"

Angiolino made no answer to this intelligent remark.

"He is going to sleep again!" cried Goneril, stopping her lunch in
despair. "He is going to sleep, and there are no end of things I want to
know. Angiolino!"

"Sissignora," murmured the boy.

"Tell me about Signor Graziano."

"He is our padrone; he is never here."

"But he is coming to-day. Wake up, Angiolino. I tell you he is on the
way!"

"Between life and death there are so many combinations," drawled the
boy, with Tuscan incredulity and sententiousness.

"Ah!" cried the girl, with a little shiver of impatience. "Is he young?"

"Che!"

"Is he old, then?"

"Neppure!"

"What is he like? He must be _something_."

"He's our padrone," repeated Angiolino, in whose imagination Signor
Graziano could occupy no other place.

"How stupid you are!" exclaimed the young English girl.

"May be," said Angiolino stolidly.

"Is he a good padrone? do you like him?"

"Rather!" The boy smiled, and raised himself on one elbow; his eyes
twinkled with good-humored malice.

"My Babbo has much better wine than _quel signore_," he said.

"But that is wrong!" cried Goneril, quite shocked.

"Who knows?"

After this, conversation flagged. Goneril tried to imagine what a great
musician could be like: long hair, of course; her imagination did not
get much beyond the hair. He would, of course, be much older now than
his portrait. Then she watched Angiolino cutting the corn, and learned
how to tie the swathes together. She was occupied in this useful