"No," she said ruefully, "you can't rub me the right way till I'm contented here as I was yesterday. Florence is all right, and the Florentines are mighty polite; but--" She looked at the fire a moment, while he tried, and failed, to find something effectively soothing to say. "In the State of Massachusetts there's a sort of spit running into the sea, and on a sand hill of this there's a little shingled house that never had a drop of paint outside of it nor of plumbing inside; but there's an old well at the back, deep as they dig them, with, on the hottest day, ice-water at the bottom. The yard is pretty well scratched up by the hens, but there are a few things in it you can't kill out--some lilacs and some tiger-lilies and a darling, ragged, straggling old strawberry-bush. Outside the fence, hosts of Bouncing Bets--you know what they are, don't you? The front door has some nice neat blinds, always closed, like those of the best room, except for weddings and funerals; but the back door is open, and when you sit on the step you can look off down an old slope of apple-orchard and over across it at the neighbors' roofs and chimneys. And there, Geraldino, is where Auroretta would like to be." He had the impulse to reach out and touch the ends of his fingers to her hand, fondly, as one might do to a child, but he prudently refrained. His eyes, however, dwelled on her with a smile that conveyed sympathy. He said, after her, amusedly: "Auroretta!" She brightened. "After I've been bad," she said, "I always am blue." * * * * * But within the hour he had come near quarreling with her, he also, and on more than one score. It began with his making a pleasant remark upon her voice, which seemed to him worth cultivating. She brushed aside the idea of devoting study to the art of singing. "But," she said, "Italo has brought me some songs. He plays them over and shows me how to sing them. We have lots of fun." To give him an example, she broke forth, adapting her peculiarly American pronunciation to Ceccherelli's peculiarly Italian intonations, "'_Non so resistere, sei troppo bella!_'" Gerald winced and darkened. "Then there's this one," she went on, "'_Mia piccirella, deh, vieni allo mare!_' Do you want to hear me sing it like Miss Felixson, together with her dog, which always bursts out howling before she's done? I've heard them three times, and can do the couple of them to a T." "Please don't!" he hurriedly requested. "I hope," he added doubtfully, "that you won't do it to amuse any of your other friends, either." As she did not quickly assure him that she neither had done, nor ever would dream of doing, such a low thing, he went on, with the liberty of speech that amazingly prevailed between them: "Extraordinary as it seems, you would be perfectly capable of it. And it would be a grave mistake." "I've done it for Italo when he was playing my accompaniment. For nobody else."