o happy before? Yes, once before,
and here, a night in March, the night Gino and Lilia had told her of
their love--the night whose evil she had come now to undo.

She gave a sudden cry of shame. "This time--the same place--the same
thing"--and she began to beat down her happiness, knowing it to be
sinful. She was here to fight against this place, to rescue a little
soul--who was innocent as yet. She was here to champion morality and
purity, and the holy life of an English home. In the spring she had
sinned through ignorance; she was not ignorant now. "Help me!" she
cried, and shut the window as if there was magic in the encircling air.
But the tunes would not go out of her head, and all night long she was
troubled by torrents of music, and by applause and laughter, and angry
young men who shouted the distich out of Baedeker:--

Poggibonizzi fatti in la,
Che Monteriano si fa citta!

Poggibonsi was revealed to her as they sang--a joyless, straggling
place, full of people who pretended. When she woke up she knew that it
had been Sawston.

Chapter 7

At about nine o'clock next morning Perfetta went out on to the loggia,
not to look at the view, but to throw some dirty water at it. "Scusi
tanto!" she wailed, for the water spattered a tall young lady who had
for some time been tapping at the lower door.

"Is Signor Carella in?" the young lady asked. It was no business of
Perfetta's to be shocked, and the style of the visitor seemed to demand
the reception-room. Accordingly she opened its shutters, dusted a round
patch on one of the horsehair chairs, and bade the lady do herself the
inconvenience of sitting down. Then she ran into Monteriano and shouted
up and down its streets until such time as her young master should hear
her.

The reception-room was sacred to the dead wife. Her shiny portrait hung
upon the wall--similar, doubtless, in all respects to the one which
would be pasted on her tombstone. A little piece of black drapery had
been tacked above the frame to lend a dignity to woe. But two of the
tacks had fallen out, and the effect was now rakish, as of a drunkard's
bonnet. A coon song lay open on the piano, and of the two tables one
supported Baedeker's "Central Italy," the other Harriet's inlaid box.
And over everything there lay a deposit of heavy white dust, which
was only blown off one moment to thicken on another. It is well to
be remembered with love. It is not so very dreadful to be forgotten