the
happiness of being in it.

But there was a lovely view nearer than this visionary one, though the
little nun seldom looked at it. If she should lean from her window she
would see the mountain-side dropping from the gray walls of her home,
with clinging flowery vines and trees growing downward, while the
olives and grapevines of the Campagna came to meet them, setting here
and there a precarious little garden half-way up the steep. Just
under her window an almost perpendicular path came up, crept round the
walls and entered the town. But no one ever used this road now, for a
far wider and better one had been constructed at the other side of the
mountain, and all the people came up that way when the day's work was
over in the Campagna.

One summer afternoon Silvia's reveries were broken by her mother's
voice calling her: "Silvia, come and prepare the salad for Matteo."

It was an extraordinary request, but the girl went at once without
question. She seized upon every opportunity to practise obedience in
preparation for that time when her life would be made up of obedience
and prayer.

Her mother was sitting by one of the windows talking with Matteo, who
had just come up from the Campagna. He had an unsocial habit of eating
alone, and, as he ate nothing when down in the vineyard, always wanted
his supper as soon as he came up. The table was set for him with
snow-white cloth and napkin, silver knife, fork and spoon, a loaf of
bread and a decanter of golden-sparkling wine icy cold from the grotto
hewn in the rock beneath the house; and he was just eating his
_minestra_ of vegetables when his sister came in. At the other end of
the long table was a head of crisp white lettuce, lying on a clean
linen towel, and two bottles--one of white vinegar, the other of oil
as sweet as cream and as bright as sunshine. Monte Compatri had no
need to send to Lucca for oil of olives while its own orchards
dropped such streams of pure richness.

The room was large and dingy. The brick floor had never known other
cleansing than sprinkling and sweeping, the yellow-washed walls had
become with time a pale, mottled brown, the paint had disappeared
under a fixed dinginess which the dusting-brush alone could not
remove, and the glass of the windows had never been washed except by
the rain. Yet, for all that, the place had an air of cleanliness. For
though these people do not clean their houses more than they clean
their yards, yet their c