ll, shading his eyes with his hand.

"Ecco!" he said, pointing across the ravine.

Far off, winding up from the sea slowly among the rocks and the
olive-trees, was a procession of donkeys, faintly relieved in the
brilliant sunshine against the mountain-side.

"One," counted Sebastiano, "two, three, four--there are four. The signore
is walking, the signora is riding. Whose donkeys have they got? Gaspare's
father's, of course. I told Gaspare to take Ciccio's, and--it is too far
to see, but I'll soon make them hear me. The signora loves the
'Pastorale.' She says there is all Sicily in it. She loves it more than
the tarantella, for she is good, Lucrezia--don't forget that--though she
is not a Catholic, and perhaps it makes her think of the coming of the
Bambino and of the Madonna. Ah! She will smile now and clap her hands
when she hears."

He put the pipe to his lips, puffed out his cheeks, and began to play the
"Pastorale" with all his might, while Lucrezia listened, staring across
the ravine at the creeping donkey, which was bearing Hermione upward to
her garden of paradise near the sky.

IV

"And then, signora, I said to Lucrezia, 'the padrona loves Zampaglione,
and you must be sure to--'"

"Wait, Gaspare! I thought I heard--Yes, it is, it is! Hush!
Maurice--listen!"

Hermione pulled up her donkey, which was the last of the little
procession, laid her hand on her husband's arm, and held her breath,
looking upward across the ravine to the opposite slope where, made tiny
by distance, she saw the white line of the low terrace wall of the Casa
del Prete, the black dots, which were the heads of Sebastiano and
Lucrezia. The other donkeys tripped on among the stones and vanished,
with their attendant boys, Gaspare's friends, round the angle of a great
rock, but Gaspare stood still beside his padrona, with his brown hand on
her donkey's neck, and Maurice Delarey, following her eyes, looked and
listened like a statue of that Mercury to which Artois had compared him.

"It's the 'Pastorale,'" Hermione whispered. "The 'Pastorale'!"

Her lips parted. Tears came into her eyes, those tears that come to a
woman in a moment of supreme joy that seems to wipe out all the sorrows
of the past. She felt as if she were in a great dream, one of those rare
and exquisite dreams that sometimes bathe the human spirit, as a warm
wave of the Ionian Sea bathes the Sicilian shore in the shadow of an
orange grove, murmuring peace. In tha