But the months went by and the seasons, and she did not recover her bloom, her mirth, her elasticity; her small face was always grave and pale. She went about her work in the same way, and was docile, and industrious, and uncomplaining, but something was wrong with her. She did not laugh, she did not sing; she seldom even spoke unless she was spoken to first. He tried to persuade himself that there was no change in her, but he knew that he tried to feed himself on falsehood. He might as well have thought his lemon-tree unaltered if he had found it withered up by fire. II Once Lizina said to her father, 'Could one walk there?' 'Where, dear? Where?' 'Where they have put Cecco,' she answered, knowing nothing of distances or measurements or the meaning of travel or change of place. She had never been farther than across the ferry to the other bank of the river. Her father threw up his hands in despair. 'Lord! my treasure! why it is miles and miles and miles away! I don't know rightly even where--some place where the sun goes down.' And her idea of walking thither seemed to him so stupefying, so amazing, so incredible, that he stared at her timorously, afraid that her brain was going wrong. He had never gone anywhere in all his life. 'Oh, my pretty, what should we do, you and I, in a strange place?' moaned Fringuello, weeping with fear at the thought of change and with grief at the worn, fevered face lifted up to his. 'Never have I stirred from here since I was born, nor you. To move to and fro--that is for well-to-do folks, not for us; and when you are so ill, my poor little one, that you can scarcely stand on your feet--if you were to die on the way----' 'I shall not die on the way,' said the child firmly. 'But I know nought of the way,' he cried wildly and piteously. 'Never was I in one of those strings of fire-led waggons, nor was ever any one of my people that ever I heard tell of. How should we ever get there, you and I? I know not even rightly what place it is.' 'I know,' said Lizina; and she took a crumpled scrap of paper out of the breast of her worn and frayed cotton frock. It bore the name of the seashore town where Cecco had died. She had got the priest to write it down for her. 'If we show this all along as we go people will put us right until we reach the place,' she said, with that quiet persistency which was so new in her. 'Ask how one can get there,' she persisted, and wound her arm about his throat, and laid her cheek against his in her old caressing way. 'You are mad, little one--quite mad!' said Fringuello, aghast and affrighted; and he begged the priest to come and see her. The priest did come, but said sorrowfully to him: 'Were I you, I would take her down to one of the hospitals in the town; she is ill.'