Poor Annie! Not an air or a grace had she more than fifteen years before. And how was she to know that she was too old for a girl's ways, she who had never ceased to be a girl to become wife and mother? Quoth Mr. Shaw to the driver, "My good woman, if you will drive these beasts with less noise it will be better for your _buona mancia_." The "good woman" stared. She had done a good deal of staring since they left the beach far down below. Her eyes in this moment looked out fiercer than ever from the bed of wrinkles folded about them by many a tropical sun and scorching sirocco. "Has the signor ever been upon the island before?" she asked a moment later. "Si, madre mia: I was here one summer several years ago. I lived in yonder palm-shaded house facing toward Sicily. I painted pictures here. Afterward I went away to my own country." Then he added, with melancholy intonation, half under his breath, "I ought to have returned long ago: I have come only to-day." Miss Deane was looking over the tops of lava-walls that narrowed in their climbing way. She saw pale-green vineyards changing color and trembling in the sea air like a maiden under her lover's first kiss. Gloomy stone-pines guarded the hills like eternal sentinels. Through dim gray-green olive-thickets houses that seemed of alabaster shimmered and shone in the sunshine. They had now climbed so high up the orange- and lemon-flecked sides of the island that Vesuvius yonder seemed to sink low and slumberously upon the bosom of the radiant bay, while Naples across the little stretch of sea showed vaguely white in the golden distance, scarcely more real than a city sculptured in snow beneath an August sun. Up from vineyard and thicket, down from the village and the cactus-pencilled heights beyond, came the long-drawn, melancholy wail which is the islander's song at his labor, but which is weird and mournful enough to be the swan-song of a parting soul to its mate. She was aroused from her artistic dreaminess by the croaking of a voice broken by years of vociferous yellings: "Dio mio! si: you painted Antonia Pisano. Yes, yes, I remember. You painted her over on yonder cliff, from whence she watched the barca of her lover Giuseppe gone fishing for coral over on the African coast. You called the picture _Good-bye, Sweetheart_. Si, I remember. You were handsomer than you are now, and your shoulders were not so broad. There were patches all over your velveteen blouse, and you remained here after all the other foreign artists were gone, because the money came not with which you must pay Giaccomo for the macaroni you had eaten for months, and the barber Angelo in the piazza for the canvases and colors you had used in painting Antonia all the months of that summer. Si, si, I remember." The handsome bachelor looked distressed at the coarsely-vivid realism with which the woman pictured that most idyllic summer of his life.