'Do, father--do!' she urged, her thin brown lips trembling with anxiety and with the sense of her own powerlessness to move unless he would consent. Her father hid his face in his hands; he felt helpless before her stronger will. She would force him to do what she desired, he knew; and he trembled, for he had neither knowledge nor means to make such a journey as this would be to the marshlands in the west, where Cecco lay. 'And the tree--the tree!' he muttered. He had seen the tree so long by that little square window, it was part of his life and hers. The thought of its sale terrified him as if he were going to sell some human friend into bondage. 'There is no other way,' said Lizina sadly. She, too, was loth to sell the tree, but they had nothing else to sell; and the intense selfishness of a fixed idea possessed her to the exclusion of all other feeling. Then the cough shook her once more from head to foot, and a little froth of blood came to her lips. Lizina, in the double cruelty of her childhood and of her ill-health, was merciless to her father, and to the tree which had been her companion so long. She was possessed by the egotism of sorrow. She was a little thing, now enfeebled and broken by long nights without sleep and long days without food, and her heart was set on this one idea, which she did not reveal--that she would die down there, and that then they would put her in the same ground with him. This was her idea. In the night she got up noiselessly, whilst her father was for awhile sunk in the deep sleep which comes after hard manual toil, and came up to the lemon-tree and leaned her cheek against its earthen vase. 'I am sorry to send you away, dearie,' she said to it; 'but there is no other way to go to him.' She felt as if it must understand and must feel wounded. Then she broke off a little branch--a small one with a few flowers on it. 'That is for him,' she said to it. And she stood there sleepily with the moonlight pouring in on her and the lemon-tree through the little square hole of the window. When she got back to her bed she was chilled to the bone, and she stuffed the rough sacking of her coverture between her teeth to stop the coughing, which might wake her father. She had put the little branch of her lemon into the broken pitcher which stood by her at night to slake her thirst. 'Sell it, _babbo_, quick, quick!' she said in the morning. She was afraid her strength would not last for the journey, but she did not say so. She tried to seem cheerful. He thought her better. 'Sell it to-day--quick, quick!' she cried feverishly; and she knew that she was cruel and ungrateful, but she persisted in her cruelty and ingratitude. Her father, in despair, yielded.