ne were in fear of being separated from its brethren and
tossed into the sea. And far below that sea spread forth its waveless,
silent wonder to a horizon-line so distant that the eyes which looked
upon it could scarcely distinguish sea from sky--a line which surely
united not divided two shades of flawless blue, linking them in a
brotherhood which should be everlasting. Few sounds, and these but
slight ones, stirred in the breast of the ardent silence; some little
notes of birds, fragmentary and wandering, wayward as pilgrims who had
forgotten to what shrine they bent their steps, some little notes of
bells swinging beneath the tufted chins of goats, the wail of a woman's
song, old in its quiet melancholy, Oriental in its strange irregularity
of rhythm, and the careless twitter of a tarantella, played upon a
reed-flute by a secluded shepherd-boy beneath the bending silver green of
tressy olives beside a tiny stream.

Lucrezia was accustomed to it all. She had been born beside that sea.
Etna had looked down upon her as she sucked and cried, toddled and
played, grew to a lusty girlhood, and on into young womanhood with its
gayety and unreason, its work and hopes and dreams. That Oriental
song--she had sung it often on the mountain-sides, as she set her bare,
brown feet on the warm stones, and lifted her head with a native pride
beneath its burdening pannier or its jar of water from the well. And she
had many a time danced to the tarantella that the shepherd-boy was
fluting, clapping her strong hands and swinging her broad hips, while the
great rings in her ears shook to and fro, and her whole healthy body
quivered to the spirit of the tune. She knew it all. It was and had
always been part of her life.

Hermione's garden of paradise generally seemed homely enough to Lucrezia.
Yet to-day, perhaps because she was dressed in her best on a day that was
not a festa, and wore a silver chain with a coral charm on it, and had
shoes on her feet, there seemed to her a newness, almost a strangeness in
the wideness and the silence, in the sunshine and the music, something
that made her breathe out a sigh, and stare with almost wondering eyes on
Etna and the sea. She soon lost her vague sensation that her life lay,
perhaps, in a home of magic, however, when she looked again at the mule
track which wound upward from the distant town, in which the train from
Messina must by this time have deposited her forestieri, and began to
think mo