"Do you know that he is rich?" she said abruptly, gnawing with her lovely teeth the jagged leaf of one of her carnations. "Yes, he is rich, Taddeo. That is why my father sold me to him. Taddeo is rich: he has gold in the ground, in the trees, in the rafters and the stones of the house; he has gold in Roman banks; he has gold in foreign scrip, and in ships, and in jewels, and in leases: he is rich. And he lives like a gray spider in the cellar-corner. He shuts me up here. We eat black bread, we see no living soul: once in the year or so I go to Orte or to Penna. And I am twenty-three years old, and I can read my own face in the mirror." She paused; her breast heaved, her beautiful low brows drew together in bitter fury at her fate: she had no thought of me. I waited, mute. I did not dare to speak. It was all true: she was the wife of Taddeo Marchioni, shut here as in a prison, with her youth passing and her loveliness unseen, and her angry soul consuming itself in its own fires. I loved her: what use was that to her--a man who had naught in all the world but the strength of his sinews and muscles? She remembered me suddenly, and gave me a gesture of dismissal: "Take your fish to the woman; I cannot pay you for them; I have never as much as a bronze coin. But--you may come back another day. Bring more--bring more." Then with a more imperious gesture she made me leave her. I stumbled out of the old dark, close-shuttered house into the burning brilliancy of the August day, giddy with passion and with hope. She knew I loved her, and yet she bade me return! I know not how much, how little, that may mean in other lands, but here in Italy it has but one language--language enough to make a lover's heart leap like the wild goat. Yet hope is perhaps too great a word to measure rightly the timid joy that filled my breast. I lay in the shepherd's hut wide awake that night, hearing the frogs croak from the Lagherello and the crickets sing in the hot darkness. The hut was empty: shepherd and sheep and dogs were all gone up to the higher grounds amongst the hills. There were some dry fern-plants in a corner of it. I lay on these and stared at the planets above me throbbing in the intense blue of the skies: they seemed to throb, they seemed alive. A mile away, between me and the stars, was the grand black pile of Sant' Aloisa.