because she could save no dowry. Everything went to
stay the seven crying mouths.

Then, on a day when half her twenty-first year had run after the others,
old Baldassare Dardicozzo stayed on the bridge to rest from the burden
of his pack--on a breezy March morning when the dust filled his eyes and
the wind emptied him of breath. Baldassare had little enough to spare as
it was. So he dropped his load in the angle of the bridge, with a
smothered "Accidente!" or some such, and leaned to watch the swollen
water buffeted crosswise by the gusts, or how the little mills
amid-stream dipped as they swam breasting the waves. In so doing he
became aware, in quite a peculiar way, of Vanna Scarpa.

Baldassare was old, red-eyed, stiff in the back. Possibly he was
rheumatic, certainly he was grumpy. He had a long slit mouth which
played him a cruel trick; for by nature it smiled when by nature he was
most melancholy. Smile it would and did, however cut-throat he felt: if
you wanted to see him grin from ear to ear you would wait till he had
had an ill day's market. Then, while sighs, curses, invocations of the
saints, or open hints to the devil came roaring from him, that hilarious
mouth of his invited you to share delights. You had needs laugh with
him, and he, cursing high and low, beamed all over his face. "To make
Baldassare laugh" became a stock periphrasis for the supreme degree of
tragedy among his neighbours. About this traitor mouth of his he had a
dew of scrubby beard, silvered black; he had bushy eyebrows, hands and
arms covered with a black pelt: he was a very hairy man. Also he was a
very warm man, as everybody knew, with a hoard of florins under the
flags of his old-clothes shop in the Via Stella.

Having spat into the water many times, rubbed his hands, mopped his
head, and cursed most things under heaven and some in it, Master
Baldassare found himself watching the laundresses on the shore. They
were the usual shrill, shrewd, and laughing line--the trade seems to
induce high mirth--and as such no bait for the old merchant by ordinary;
but just now the sun and breeze together made a bright patch of them,
set them at a provoking flutter. Baldassare, prickly with dust, found
them like their own cool linen hung out to dance itself dry in the wind.
Most of all he noticed Vanna, whom he knew well enough, because when she
knelt upright she was taller and more wayward than the rest, and because
the wind made so plain the pret