"Have it your own way!" murmured Uncle Pera, relapsing into his cough. Anania stood at the window beside the heap of husks, oppressed by mysterious sadness. He knew the boy at Carchide's; he was wild, but not more so than Bustianeddu and many of the schoolboys. Why did not Signor Carboni take him into his house and give him a home, as the olive miller had done for his son? Then he thought-- "Has that boy a mother, I wonder?" Ah! the mother! the mother! As Anania grew and his mind opened, its ideas and perceptions taking form unobserved like the petals of a wild flower, so the thought of his mother became ever clearer in the haze of his new found conscience. He belonged now to the Fifth Elementary Form, and was associated with boys of every condition and of every character. He began to have knowledge of the science of good and evil. He was now intelligently ashamed if any one alluded to his mother, and remembered that he had always felt ashamed instinctively. Yet he was consumed by the desire to know where she was, to see her again, and reproach her with having deserted him. The unknown land, mysterious and far, to which she had fled, was taking to Anania's eyes clear outline and appearance, like that land discerned amid the mists of dawn to which the voyaging ship draws ever nearer. He studied geography with interest; and knew exactly how he should go from the island to that continent which concealed his mother. As once in the mountain village he had dreamed of the town where his father lived, so now he pondered upon the great cities described by his teachers and his books, and in one of them, and in all, he saw the figure of his mother. Her physical image, like an old photograph, was growing fainter and fainter in his memory; but he always thought of her as dressed in the Sardinian costume, barefoot, slender, and very sorrowful. That year an event occurred which was deeply impressive to his imagination. This was the return of Bustianeddu's mother. Anania was a pupil at the Gymnasium, secretly enamoured of Margherita Carboni, and believing himself quite grown up. The woman's reappearance moved the whole neighbourhood, and Anania wondered over it by day and by night. Ostensibly, however, he took no interest in the event. Some time passed before he saw the woman who had hidden herself in the house of a relative. Bustianeddu, however, who had become grave and astute beyond his years, spoke frequently of her to Anania. Uncle Pera was growing old and the olive-miller assisted him in the cultivation of his beans and teazles. Anania had free ingress to the garden, and often carried his books to a grassy bank beside the streamlet, whence under the shadow of the prickly pears he could see the wild panorama of mountains and valleys. Here Bustianeddu would find him when he wanted to pour out his confidences. Bustianeddu spoke sceptically and coldly, unaware of the tumults of emotion working in the soul of his friend.