The "strangers' room"--the name given to that apartment which every Nuorese family, according to immemorial custom, reserves for the use of friends from the country--was large, white, and bare; it had a great wooden bedstead, a table covered with a cotton cloth and adorned with little glass cups and saucers, and a quantity of small pictures hung close to the unpainted wooden ceiling. Bunches of dried grapes and yellow pears hung from the rafters, filling the room with a faint fragrance; and sacks of wool stood about on the floor. The stout woman, who was the mistress of the house, laid hold of one of these sacks, dragged it to another part of the room, and then back again to where she had found it. "Now then," said she, panting from her exertion, "do stop. What good does it do? And why should you give up, anyhow? What the devil, my dearie! Suppose the public prosecutor _has_ asked for the galleys, that doesn't mean that the jury are all mad dogs like himself!" But the other only kept on crying and shaking her head, moaning: "No, no, no!" between her sobs. "Yes, yes, I tell you," urged the woman. "Get up now, and come to your mother," and, taking hold of her, she forced back her head. The action revealed a charming countenance; rosy, framed in a thick mass of tumbled black hair; the big dark eyes swollen and glistening with tears, and surmounted by heavy black eyebrows that met in the middle. "No, no," wailed Giovanna, shaking herself free. "Let me cry over my fate, Aunt Porredda."[1] "Fate or no fate, you just get up!" "No, I won't get up! I won't get up! They'll sentence him to thirty years at the very least! Do you hear me? Thirty years! That's what they'll give him!" "That remains to be seen. And after all, what is thirty years? Why, you carry on like a wildcat!" The other gave a shrill cry, and tore her hair in an access of wild despair. "Thirty years! What is thirty years!" she shrieked. "A man's whole lifetime, Aunt Porredda! You don't know what you are talking about, Aunt Porredda! Go away, go away and leave me alone! for the love of Christ, oh, leave me to myself!" "I'm not going away," said Aunt Porredda. "The idea! In my own house! Get up, you child of the devil! Stop this before you make yourself ill. To-morrow will be time enough to pull your hair out by the roots; your husband isn't in the galleys yet!" Giovanna dropped her head, and began to cry again in a subdued, hopeless way, heartbreaking to listen to. "Costantino, Costantino," she moaned in the tone of one bewailing the dead, "I shall never see you again, never again! Those mad dogs have seized you and bound you fast, and they will never let you go; and our house will be empty, and the bed cold, and the family scattered. Oh, my beloved! my lamb! you are dead for this world. May those who have done it die the same death!"