In a little while a sacristan came out of the presbytery near the church, and began to turn a great rusty key in the church door. He saw the two sitting there by the graveyard, and looking at them over his shoulder, said to them, 'You are strangers--what would you?' Lizina rose and answered him: 'Will you open to me? I come to see my Cecco, who lies here. I have something to give him.' The sacristan looked at her father. 'Cecco?' he repeated, in a doubtful tone. 'A lad of Royezzano, a soldier who died here,' said Fringuello, hoarsely and faintly, for his throat was parched and swollen, and his head swam. 'He and my child were playmates. Canst tell us, good man, where his grave is made?' The sacristan paused, standing before the leathern curtain of the church porch, trying to remember. Save for soldiers and the fisher folk, there was no one who either lived or died there; his mind went back over the winter and autumn months, to the last summer, in which the marsh fever and the pestilential drought had made many sicken and some die in the fort and in the town. 'Cecco? Cecco?' he said doubtfully. 'A Tuscan lad? A conscript? Ay, I do recall him now. He got the tertian fever and died in barracks. His reverence wrote about him to his family. Yes, I remember. There were three soldier lads died last year, all in the summer. There are three crosses where they lie. I put them there; his is the one nearest the wall. Yes, you can go in; I have the key.' He stepped across the road and unlocked the gate. He looked wonderingly on Lizina as he did so. 'Poor little one!' he muttered, in compassion. 'How small, how ill, to come so far!' Neither she nor her father seemed to hear him. The child pressed through the aperture as soon as the door was drawn ajar, and Fringuello followed her. The burial-ground was small and crowded, covered with rank grass, and here and there sea-lavender was growing. The sacristan led them to a spot by the western wall where there were three rude crosses made of unbarked sticks nailed across one another. The rank grass was growing amongst the clods of sun-baked yellow clay; the high white wall rose behind the crossed sticks; the sun beat down on the place: there was nothing else. The sacristan motioned to the cross nearest the wall, and then went back to the church, being in haste, as it was late for matins. Lizina stood by the two poor rude sticks, once branches of the hazel, which were all that marked the grave of Cecco. Her father, uncovering his head, fell on his knees. The child's face was illuminated with a strange and holy rapture. She kissed the lemon bough which she held in her hand, and then laid it gently down upon the grass and clay under the wall.