re naturally of the days that lay before her, of her novel and
important duties, and of the unusual sums of money that her activities
were to earn her.

Gaspare, who, as major-domo, had chosen her imperiously for his assistant
and underling in the house of the priest, had informed her that she was
to receive twenty-five lire a month for her services, besides food and
lodging, and plenty of the good, red wine of Amato. To Lucrezia such
wages seemed prodigal. She had never yet earned more than the half of
them. But it was not only this prospect of riches which now moved and
excited her.

She was to live in a splendidly furnished house with wealthy and
distinguished people; she was to sleep in a room all to herself, in a bed
that no one had a right to except herself. This was an experience that in
her most sanguine moments she had never anticipated. All her life had
been passed en famille in the village of Marechiaro, which lay on a
table-land at the foot of Monte Amato, half-way down to the sea. The
Gabbis were numerous, and they all lived in one room, to which cats,
hens, and turkeys resorted with much freedom and in considerable numbers.
Lucrezia had never known, perhaps had never desired, a moment of privacy,
but now she began to awake to the fact that privacy and daintiness and
pretty furniture were very interesting, and even touching, as well as
very phenomenal additions to a young woman's existence. What could the
people who had the power to provide them be like? She scanned the
mule-track with growing eagerness, but the procession did not appear. She
saw only an old contadino in a long woollen cap riding slowly into the
recesses of the hills on a donkey, and a small boy leading his goats to
pasture. The train must have been late. She turned round from the view
and examined her new home once more. Already she knew it by heart, yet
the wonder of it still encompassed her spirit.

Hermione's cottage, the eyrie to which she was bringing Maurice Delarey,
was only a cottage, although to Lucrezia it seemed almost a palace. It
was whitewashed, with a sloping roof of tiles, and windows with green
Venetian shutters. Although it now belonged to a contadino, it had
originally been built by a priest, who had possessed vineyards on the
mountain-side, and who wished to have a home to which he could escape
from the town where he lived when the burning heats of the summer set in.
Above his vineyards, some hundreds of yards from th