t old tune of the "Pastorale" all
her thoughts of Sicily, and her knowledge of Sicily, and her
imaginations, and her deep and passionately tender and even ecstatic
love of Sicily seemed folded and cherished like birds in a nest. She
could never have explained, she could only feel how. In the melody, with
its drone bass, the very history of the enchanted island was surely
breathed out. Ulysses stood to listen among the flocks of Polyphemus.
Empedocles stayed his feet among the groves of Etna to hear it. And
Persephone, wandering among the fields of asphodel, paused with her white
hands out-stretched to catch its drowsy beauty; and Arethusa, turned into
a fountain, hushed her music to let it have its way. And Hermione heard
in it the voice of the Bambino, the Christ-child, to whose manger-cradle
the shepherds followed the star, and the voice of the Madonna, Maria
stella del mare, whom the peasants love in Sicily as the child loves its
mother. And those peasants were in it, too, people of the lava wastes and
the lava terraces where the vines are green against the black, people of
the hazel and the beech forests, where the little owl cries at eve,
people of the plains where, beneath the yellow lemons, spring the yellow
flowers that are like their joyous reflection in the grasses, people of
the sea, that wonderful purple sea in whose depth of color eternity seems
caught. The altars of the pagan world were in it, and the wayside shrines
before which the little lamps are lit by night upon the lonely
mountain-sides, the old faith and the new, and the love of a land that
lives on from generation to generation in the pulsing breasts of men.

And Maurice was in it, too, and Hermione and her love for him and his for
her.

Gaspare did not move. He loved the "Pastorale" almost without knowing
that he loved it. It reminded him of the festa of Natale, when, as a
child, dressed in a long, white garment, he had carried a blazing torch
of straw down the steps of the church of San Pancrazio before the canopy
that sheltered the Bambino. It was a part of his life, as his mother
was, and Tito the donkey, and the vineyards, the sea, the sun. It pleased
him to hear it, and to feel that his padrona from a far country loved it,
and his isle, his "Paese" in which it sounded. So, though he had been
impatient to reach the Casa del Prete and enjoy the reward of praise
which he considered was his due for his forethought and his labors, he
stood very