same breath he was gone, followed
by the bagpipe. Alvina saw them dropping hurriedly down the incline
between the twiggy wild oaks.

"They will come every day now, till Christmas," said Ciccio. "They
go to every house."

And sure enough, when Alvina went down, in the cold, silent house,
and out to the well in the still crumbling snow, she heard the sound
far off, strange, yelling, wonderful: and the same ache for she knew
not what overcame her, so that she felt one might go mad, there in
the veiled silence of these mountains, in the great hilly valley cut
off from the world.

Ciccio worked all day on the land or round about. He was building a
little earth closet also: the obvious and unscreened place outside
was impossible. It was curious how little he went to Pescocalascio,
how little he mixed with the natives. He seemed always to withhold
something from them. Only with his relatives, of whom he had many,
he was more free, in a kind of family intimacy.

Yet even here he was guarded. His uncle at the mill, an unwashed,
fat man with a wife who tinkled with gold and grime, and who shouted
a few lost words of American, insisted on giving Alvina wine and a
sort of cake made with cheese and rice. Ciccio too was feasted, in
the dark hole of a room. And the two natives seemed to press their
cheer on Alvina and Ciccio whole-heartedly.

"How nice they are!" said Alvina when she had left. "They give so
freely."

But Ciccio smiled a wry smile, silent.

"Why do you make a face?" she said.

"It's because you are a foreigner, and they think you will go away
again," he said.

"But I should have thought that would make them less generous," she
said.

"No. They like to give to foreigners. They don't like to give to the
people here. Giocomo puts water in the wine which he sells to the
people who go by. And if I leave the donkey in her shed, I give
Marta Maria something, or the next time she won't let me have it.
Ha, they are--they are sly ones, the people here."

"They are like that everywhere," said Alvina.

"Yes. But nowhere they say so many bad things about people as
here--nowhere where I have ever been."

It was strange to Alvina to feel the deep-bed-rock distrust which
all the hill-peasants seemed to have of one another. They were
watchful, venomous, dangerous.

"Ah," said Pancrazio, "I am glad there is a woman in my house once
more."

"But did _nobody_ come in and do for you before?" asked Alvina. "Why
didn'