t you pay somebody?"

"Nobody will come," said Pancrazio, in his slow, aristocratic
English. "Nobody will come, because I am a man, and if somebody
should see her at my house, they will all talk."

"Talk!" Alvina looked at the deeply-lined man of sixty-six, "But
what will they say?"

"Many bad things. Many bad things indeed. They are not good people
here. All saying bad things, and all jealous. They don't like me
because I have a house--they think I am too much a _signore_. They
say to me 'Why do you think you are a signore?' Oh, they are bad
people, envious, you cannot have anything to do with them."

"They are nice to me," said Alvina.

"They think you will go away. But if you stay, they will say bad
things. You must wait. Oh, they are evil people, evil against one
another, against everybody but strangers who don't know them--"

Alvina felt the curious passion in Pancrazio's voice, the passion of a
man who has lived for many years in England and known the social
confidence of England, and who, coming back, is deeply injured by the
ancient malevolence of the remote, somewhat gloomy hill-peasantry. She
understood also why he was so glad to have her in his house, so proud,
why he loved serving her. She seemed to see a fairness, a luminousness
in the northern soul, something free, touched with divinity such as
"these people here" lacked entirely.

When she went to Ossona with him, she knew everybody questioned him
about her and Ciccio. She began to get the drift of the
questions--which Pancrazio answered with reserve.

"And how long are they staying?"

This was an invariable, envious question. And invariably Pancrazio
answered with a reserved--

"Some months. As long as _they_ like."

And Alvina could feel waves of black envy go out against Pancrazio,
because she was domiciled with him, and because she sat with him in
the flat cart, driving to Ossona.

Yet Pancrazio himself was a study. He was thin, and very shabby, and
rather out of shape. Only in his yellow eyes lurked a strange
sardonic fire, and a leer which puzzled her. When Ciccio happened to
be out in the evening he would sit with her and tell her stories of
Lord Leighton and Millais and Alma Tadema and other academicians
dead and living. There would sometimes be a strange passivity on his
worn face, an impassive, almost Red Indian look. And then again he
would stir into a curious, arch, malevolent laugh, for all the world
like a debauched old tom-c