"Nevertheless, I should not have employed him," the mother said. "He has disobeyed and disappointed his parents, and he should be punished. They meant him to be a priest, and raked and scraped every soldo to educate him. Now, just when he is at the point of being able to repay them, he makes up his mind that he has no vocation for the priesthood, and breaks their hearts by his ingratitude. It is nonsense to set one's will up so and have such scruples. Obedience is vocation enough for anything. There should be a prison where parents could put the children who disobey them." The Sora Guai spoke sternly, and looked as if she would not have hesitated to put a refractory child in the deepest of dungeons. "He was a fool, but he earns his money," Matteo responded, and, drawing a plate of deliciously fried frogs toward him, began to gnaw them and throw the bones on the floor. Silvia gave him the salad, and poured wine and water into the tumbler for him, while his mother went to the kitchen for a dish of fricasseed pigeons. "There's no onion in the salad," Matteo grumbled when she came back. Silvia uttered an exclamation of dismay, ran for a silvery-white little onion and sliced it thinly into the salad. "Forgive me, Matteo," she said. "I was distracted by the thought of Claudio. It seems such a terrible thing." "It would be a much more terrible thing if it were a girl who disobeyed," Matteo growled. He did not like that girls should criticise men. "So it would," the girl responded with meek readiness. "I don't know why I feel so tired to-day," the mother said, sinking into a chair again. "My bones ache as if I had been working in the vineyard all day." "You are not ill, mamma?" exclaimed Silvia, blushing with alarm. The answer was a hesitating one: "I don't see what can ail me. It wouldn't be anything, only that I am so tired without having done much." "Perhaps it's the weather, mamma," Silvia suggested. Gentle as she was, she had adopted the ruthless and ungrateful Italian custom of ascribing every ache and pain of the body to some almost imperceptible change in their too beautiful weather. The smallest cloud goes laden with more accusations than it holds drops of rain, and the ill winds that blow nobody any good blow through those shining skies from morning till night and from night till morning again. The Sora Guai was sicker than she dreamed. It was not the summer sun that scorched her so, nor the _scirocco_ that made her head so heavy. What malaria she had found to breathe on the mountain-top it would be hard to say; but the dreaded _perniciosa_ had caught her in its grasp, and she was doomed. The fever burned fiercely for a few days, and when it was quenched there was nothing left but ashes.