Miss Deane considerately pretended not to have heard, and kept her blue eyes vaguely set in the direction of the dread volcano dreaming in the arms of the bay. But she had mistaken the cause of her countryman's embarrassment. And who would not have done so, believing as all the world does that romance and robustness mate not together? "Yes, I was very poor in those days. Many and many a dinner did I go without, that I might buy a new kerchief for Antonia or send to Naples for another string of beads for her neck. Those patches betrayed only half my poverty, for nobody knew that I put them there myself to save the few soldi a seamstress would demand, that I might give Antonia another festa and worship her wild grace as she danced the tarantella and rattled her castanets upon the moonlighted roof of some fisher-friend's house." He seemed to address Miss Deane, for he spoke in English. She, in common politeness, could not do less than say, "Indeed! And who was Antonia?" "She is the loveliest creature on the island, and as good as she is beautiful. She came as straight from the heart of Nature as a flower or a bird's song. Neither poetry nor painting could ever grasp the freshness of her wild sweetness: one must see her to know the abject poverty of their highest efforts." To hear such adolescent rubbish from middle-aged lips what sensible mortal would not have giggled in his sleeve? Strangely enough, it was the donkey-woman who proved her good sense and surprised them both not only by laughing discordantly aloud, but by speaking in very broken but intelligible English: "Si, si, I remember. And why have you come back to the island, signor?" Actually, the bachelor blushed. "To marry Antonia," he said as bashfully as if he weighed one hundred instead of two hundred and twenty pounds, "and to remain on this savagely-beautiful isle all the rest of my life." This he had said in Italian. But he continued, half musingly, in his mother tongue: "I could not take her away with me _then_, even though I loved her with all my heart and she was willing to share my poverty. I had not the heart to see her pine and pale in narrow city streets. I knew that she was a wild flower that would lose fragrance and beauty, would die, if transplanted from its native soil. I went away to earn money enough that I might come back and live with my darling where only she could live at her best. I have worked hard for her in all these years. I know I ought to have come sooner, but it insensibly grew a habit with me each year to wait yet one year more, that I might come to her a little richer. But I have come at last. I have sent her letters and presents each year, and she has written me often through some amanuensis, for she cannot write herself; and I am come to her able to say truly that she is the only woman I ever loved, or ever imagined myself to have loved, in all my life."