“Who composed--how I love him!--that lovely 'la, la, la, la,' and the 'te-de, ta-da, te-dio,' that pleases you, out of 'Il Maladetto.' And I am descended from him! Let me hope I shall not be unworthy of him. You will never tell it till people think as much of me, or nearly. My father says I shall never be so great, because I am half English. It's not my fault. My mother was English. But I feel that I am much more Italian than English. How I long for Italy--like a thing underground! My father did something against the Austrians, when he was a young man. Would not I have done it? I am sure I would--I don't know what. Whenever I think of Italy, night or day, pant-pant goes my heart. The name of Italy is my nightingale: I feel that somebody lives that I love, and is ill-treated shamefully, crying out to me for help. My father had to run away to save his life. He was fifteen days lying in the rice-fields to escape from the soldiers--which makes me hate a white coat. There was my father; and at night he used to steal out to one of the villages, where was a good, true woman--so they are, most, in Italy! She gave him food; maize-bread and wine, sometimes meat; sometimes a bottle of good wine. When my father thinks of it he cries, if there is gin smelling near him. At last my father had to stop there day and night. Then that good woman's daughter came to him to keep him from starving; she risked being stripped naked and beaten with rods, to keep my father from starving. When my father speaks of Sandra now, it makes my mother--she does not like it. I am named after her: Emilia Alessandra Belloni. 'Sandra' is short for it. She did not know why I was christened that, and will never call me anything but Emilia, though my father says Sandra, always. My father never speaks of that dear Sandra herself, except when he is tipsy. Once I used to wish him to be tipsy; for then I used to sit at my piano while he talked, and I made all his words go into music. One night I did it so well, my father jumped right up from his chair, shouting 'Italia!' and he caught his wig off his head, and threw it into the fire, and rushed out into the street quite bald, and people thought him mad. “It was the beginning of all our misfortunes! My father was taken and locked up in a place as a tipsy man. That he has never forgiven the English for! It has made me and my mother miserable ever since. My mother is sure it is all since that night. Do you know, I remember, though I was so young, that I felt the music--oh! like a devil in my bosom? Perhaps it was, and it passed out of me into him. Do you think it was?” Wilfrid answered: “Well, no! I shouldn't think you had anything to do with the devil.” Indeed, he was beginning to think her one of the smallest of frocked female essences.