She wore a rough dark skirt and crimson bodice, and a white cloth folded on her head in the manner of the Agro Romano; the clothes were poor and torn in places, and showed her skin, which was of a clear pale brown; her brows were level and dark, her eyes black as a stormy night, and her mouth was red as any scarlet berry of the spindle-tree in October. She had wooers as many as a population scattered far and wide afforded; but no one of them ever had more from her than a curt salute or a brisk “begone.” She knew what it was to bear children for poor men, whether in wedlock or outside it, and she was in no haste to eat “the sweet fruit with the bitter stone.” “How did you come here?” said Lucio angrily, at the sight of her, as he backed the coffin and cart into the burial-place. “You would not bring me, so I walked across by the hill paths,” she answered. “Womenkind have no business at these rites,” said Lucio; and the sexton added, with a leer: “Bridals and baptisms are for handsome wenches, not burials.” She did not reply to either; but she took one end of the wooden box and obliged them to lift it not too roughly to the ground. “You did well to come,” said Cyrille to her, with sympathy. She said nothing. She was not there for the sake of her dead grandsire, but to prevent the scheme of thieving the mules which she had guessed had been planned between her uncles. “Meddling, mischievous baggage!” muttered Lucio. What business had women to cross and mar men’s work? When the brief rites were over, and the deal box had been tumbled under clods of clay, she spoke to no one, but climbed into the cart, taking the reins of rope. “Lie down on the straw and sleep,” she said curtly to her uncle. He was cowed; he knew that his intentions had been read. He stretched himself grumbling in the bottom of the cart, and pulled his pipe out of his breeches pocket. “You may ride on,” said the girl to Cyrille. “The mules shall be at your place before moon-rise, and neither footsore nor wind-blown, I promise you.” Then the reason of her presence in the burial-ground occurred to him. “She is a brave woman,” he thought, “and, I fear, the only honest one of her brood.” He saluted her courteously, and rode down the steep street with its miserably sickly people staring after him, and flocking round his stirrup leathers with piteous outcries for alms. As he turned in his saddle and looked back whilst his horse slackened pace to pass over a little bridge, the clouds had lifted. Above in the distance was the crumbling indented outline of the little walled hamlet, brown and gray, solitary and drear, and midway on the slope below it was a dusky moving patch made on the white dust, a patch which was Muriella and the mules. Above head the sun was breaking through the clouds in pale faint gold.