But he looked at her with wonder in his dark-brown, ox-like eyes. 'Where do you live?' he asked; 'and how knew you my name?' 'Everybody knows your name,' she answered. 'You are Caris, the son of Lisabetta, and when you sit on your doorstep it would be a fool indeed would not see who you are.' 'So it would,' said Caris. 'But you,' he added after a pause, 'who are you? And what did you want with Black Magic?' 'I am Santina, the daughter of Neri, the smith, by the west gate in Pistoia,' she said in reply to the first question, and making none to the second. 'But what wanted you of my mother?' he persisted. 'They said she knew strange things,' said the girl evasively. 'If she did she had little profit of them,' said Caris sadly. The girl looked at him with great persuasiveness in her face, and leaned a little nearer to him. 'You did not really bury the charms with her? You have got them inside? You will let me see them, eh?' 'As the saints live, I buried them,' said Caris truthfully; 'they were rubbish, or worse; accursed maybe. They are safe down in the ground till the Last Day. What can such a bright wench as yourself want with such queer, unhallowed notions?' The girl Santina glanced over her shoulders to make sure that no one was listening; then she said in a whisper: 'There is the Gobbo's treasure in these woods somewhere--and Lisabetta had the wand that finds gold and silver.' Caris burst into a loud laugh. 'Ah, truly! That is a good jest. If she could find gold and silver, why did we always have iron spoons for our soup, and a gnawing imp in our stomachs? Go to, my maiden. Do not tell such tales. Lisabetta was a poor and hungry woman all her days, and scarce left enough linen to lay her out in decently, so help me Heaven!' The girl shook her head. 'You know there is the treasure in the woods,' she said angrily. 'Nay, I never heard of it. Oh, the Gobbo's? Che-che! For hundreds of years they have grubbed for it all over the woods, and who ever found anything, eh?' 'Your mother was very nigh it often and often. She told me.' 'In her dreams, poor soul!' 'But dreams mean a great deal.' 'Sometimes,' said Caris seriously. 'But what is it to you?' he added, the suspicion always inherent to the peasant struggling with his admiration of the girl, who, unbidden, had seated herself upon the stone before the door. With feminine instinct she felt that to make him do what she wished, she must confide in him, or appear to confide. And thereon she told him that unless she could save herself, her family would wed her to a wealthy old curmudgeon who was a cart-maker in the town; and to escape this fate she had interrogated the stars by means of the dead Lisabetta and of the astrologer Faraone, who dwelt also in the hills, but this latter reader of destiny would tell her nothing, because he was a friend of her father's, and now the witch of Genistrello was dead and had left her fate but half told!