to!" And she had screamed with mirth,
her handsome little face rippling all over with gayety like the waves of
the sea with the sunshine.

He had remembered her, and had been glad when Tasso Tassilo, the miller,
had gone sixty miles away for a wife, and had brought her from the Bocca
d'Arno to live at the mill on the small river which was the sole water
that ran through the village of Marca.

Tasso Tassilo, going on business once to the sea-coast, had chanced to
see that handsome face of hers, and had wooed and won her without great
difficulty, for her people were poor folk, living by carting sand, and
she herself was tired of her bare legs and face, her robust hunger,
which made her glad to eat the fruit off the cactus-plants, and her
great beauty, which nobody ever saw except the sea-gulls and carters and
fishers and cane-cutters, who were all as poor as she was herself.

Tasso Tassilo, in his own person, she hated, an ugly, dry, elderly man,
with his soul wrapped up in his flour-bags and his money-bags; but he
adored her, and let her spend as she chose on her attire and her
ornaments; and the mill-house was a pleasant place enough with its walls
painted on the outside _in tempora_, and the willows drooping over its
eaves, and the young men and the mules loitering about on the land-side
of it, and the peasants coming up with corn to be ground whenever there
had been rain in summer and so water enough in the river-bed to turn the
mill-wheels. In drought the stream was low and its stones dry and no
work could be done by the grindstones. There was then only water enough
for the ducks to paddle in, and the pretty teal to float in, which they
would always do at sunrise unless the miller let fly a a charge of small
shot among them from the windows under the roof.

"Good-evening, Don Gesualdo," said the miller's wife now, in the midst
of the nightingale's song and the orange glow from the sunset.

Gesualdo rose with a smile. He was always glad to see her. She had
something about her for him of boyhood, of home, of the sea, and of the
careless days before he became a seminarist: he did not positively
regret that he had entered the priesthood, but he remembered the earlier
life wistfully, and with wonder that he could ever have been that
light-hearted lad who had run through the canebrakes to plunge into the
rolling waters with all the wide gay sunlit world of sea and sky and
river and shore before him, behind him, and ab