be born here."

"Would you like to bring up a child here?" she asked.

"You wouldn't be happy here, so long," he said, sadly.

"Would you?"

He slowly shook his head: indefinite.

She was settling down. She had her room upstairs, her cups and
plates and spoons, her own things. Pancrazio had gone back to his
old habit, he went across and ate with Giovanni and Maria, Ciccio
and Alvina had their meals in their pleasant room upstairs. They
were happy alone. Only sometimes the terrible influence of the place
preyed on her.

However, she had a clean room of her own, where she could sew and
read. She had written to the matron and Mrs. Tuke, and Mrs. Tuke had
sent books. Also she helped Ciccio when she could, and Maria was
teaching her to spin the white sheep's wool into coarse thread.

This morning Pancrazio and Giovanni had gone off somewhere, Alvina
and Ciccio were alone on the place, stripping the last maize.
Suddenly, in the grey morning air, a wild music burst out: the
drone of a bagpipe, and a man's high voice half singing, half
yelling a brief verse, at the end of which a wild flourish on some
other reedy wood instrument. Alvina sat still in surprise. It was a
strange, high, rapid, yelling music, the very voice of the
mountains. Beautiful, in our musical sense of the word, it was not.
But oh, the magic, the nostalgia of the untamed, heathen past which
it evoked.

"It is for Christmas," said Ciccio. "They will come every day now."

Alvina rose and went round to the little balcony. Two men stood
below, amid the crumbling of finely falling snow. One, the elder,
had a bagpipe whose bag was patched with shirting: the younger was
dressed in greenish clothes, he had his face lifted, and was yelling
the verses of the unintelligible Christmas ballad: short, rapid
verses, followed by a brilliant flourish on a short wooden pipe he
held ready in his hand. Alvina felt he was going to be out of
breath. But no, rapid and high came the next verse, verse after
verse, with the wild scream on the little new pipe in between, over
the roar of the bagpipe. And the crumbs of snow were like a speckled
veil, faintly drifting the atmosphere and powdering the littered
threshold where they stood--a threshold littered with faggots,
leaves, straw, fowls and geese and ass droppings, and rag thrown out
from the house, and pieces of paper.

The carol suddenly ended, the young man snatched off his hat to
Alvina who stood above, and in the