ittle gray lizards warming themselves in the sun on
the tombs. The tombs are now in two rows on the road that leads to the
church. They are formed like cisterns, and serve as beds for the poor at
night. One night, when I was walking among them, I met a good old woman
who was placing dried herbs in the tomb of an old maid who had died
on her wedding-day. We said goodnight to her. She replied: 'May God
hear-you! but fate wills that this tomb should open on the side of the
northwest wind. If only it were open on the other side, I should be
lying as comfortably as Queen Jeanne.'"

Therese made no answer. She was dozing. And Choulette shivered in the
cold of the night, in the fear of death.

CHAPTER VIII. THE LADY OF THE BELLS

In her English cart, which she drove herself, Miss Bell had brought
over the hills, from the railway station at Florence, the Countess
Martin-Belleme and Madame Marmet to her pink-tinted house at Fiesole,
which, crowned with a long balustrade, overlooked the incomparable city.
The maid followed with the luggage. Choulette, lodged, by Miss Bell's
attention, in the house of a sacristan's widow, in the shadow of the
cathedral of Fiesole, was not expected until dinner. Plain and gentle,
wearing short hair, a waistcoat, a man's shirt on a chest like a boy's,
almost graceful, with small hips, the poetess was doing for her French
friends the honors of the house, which reflected the ardent delicacy of
her taste. On the walls of the drawing-room were pale Virgins, with
long hands, reigning peacefully among angels, patriarchs, and saints in
beautiful gilded frames. On a pedestal stood a Magdalena, clothed only
with her hair, frightful with thinness and old age, some beggar of the
road to Pistoia, burned by the suns and the snows, whom some unknown
precursor of Donatello had moulded. And everywhere were Miss Bell's
chosen arms-bells and cymbals. The largest lifted their bronze clappers
at the angles of the room; others formed a chain at the foot of the
walls. Smaller ones ran along the cornices. There were bells over the
hearth, on the cabinets, and on the chairs. The shelves were full of
silver and golden bells. There were big bronze bells marked with the
Florentine lily; bells of the Renaissance, representing a lady wearing
a white gown; bells of the dead, decorated with tears and bones; bells
covered with symbolical animals and leaves, which had rung in the
churches in the time of St. Louis; table-bel