aster bust of Dante
stood on the table, and Olive kept the flowers her pupils gave her,
pink oleander blossoms and white roses from the terrace gardens, in a
jar of majolica ware, but otherwise the place was unadorned.

"It is like a convent," Carmela said when she came there with Maria
and her aunt for an English tea-drinking.

Signora Carosi had sipped a little tea and eaten a good many of the
cakes Olive had bought from the _pasticceria_. "The situation is
impossible," she remarked, as she brushed the crumbs off her lap.

"The stairs are a drawback," Olive admitted, not without malice, "but
fortunately my pupils are all young and strong."

"You are English. I always say that when I am asked how I can permit
such things. 'What would you? She teaches men grammar alone in an
attic. I cannot help it. She is English.'"

Gemma had been asked to come too on this occasion, but she had excused
herself. She so often had headaches when the others were going out,
and they would leave her lying down in her room. When they came back
she was always up and better, and yet she seemed feverish and strange.
Then sometimes of a morning, when Maria and the aunt had gone out
marketing, and Carmela, shapeless and dishevelled in her white cotton
jacket, was dusting or ironing, the beautiful idle sister would come
out of her room, dressed for the street and carrying a prayer-book.
Carmela would remonstrate with her. "You are not going alone?"

"Only to mass."

On the morning of the fifteenth of August she did not go with the
others to the parish church at six o'clock, but she was up early,
nevertheless. She wrote a letter, and presently, having sealed it, she
dropped it out of the window. A boy who had been lingering about the
piazza since dawn, and staring up at the close-shuttered fronts of the
tall houses, picked it up and ran off with it. When Maria and Carmela
came back with their aunt soon after seven they drank their black
coffee in the kitchen before going to their rooms to rest. Carolina
took Olive's breakfast in to her on a tray when they were gone. The
English girl had milk with her coffee and some slices of bread spread
with rancid butter. Gemma lay in wait for the old woman and stopped
her as she came from the kitchen.

"Find out what she is going to do to-day," she whispered.

Carolina nodded and her shrivelled monkey face was puckered into a
smile. She came back presently. "She is going to the Duomo and then to
_col