“_Buon giorno_, Caterina; what a fine day, if the sun would only stay!” He flourished his whip and flicked a fly off the mule’s ear. Caterina looked at him adoringly and echoed his wish: “Perhaps the rains are over,” she said. “Thou art well, Carlino?” While they talked about the weather, their eyes also spoke of secrets unspeakable. It was easy to see how things stood between them. In that dreadful indescribable atmosphere, hazel eyes caught fire from blue. Death had become a commonplace to the lover and his lass; after so many months of familiarity they had grown callous to its ugliness. In the meeting of their eyes, life laughed at death. In the upper, more aristocratic part of the _campo santo_, the dead lay in separate graves. Caterina stopped near two grave-diggers at work. “Two metres deep,” she said sagely. A pair of stone-masons were working here, directed by a tall eagle-faced man and a youth, evidently his son. One mason marked on a small white headstone letters and a date in black; then with a chisel, which he knocked only with his hand, chipped out the letters from the stone. It must have been soft as cheese, for by the time the grave was a metre deep, the name Domenica was neatly carved. The second mason was smoothing a little white cross that had been roughed out of the same soft stone. When the grave was two metres deep, cross and headstone were ready. The plain wooden coffin had a rude cross nailed on the lid. Without a flower or a tear, it was lowered into the grave and the earth filled in. “Thou hast done well and quickly,” said the gentleman to the elder mason. “Here is the money as agreed.” “The others the Signore spoke of?” “Gone--there was some mistake. We have found only this, the youngest. Perhaps another has buried them, thinking them his own. I return to Rome tonight.” Then I remembered: this was the man I had met with the fair young woman going from one survivor to another, asking for news of Messina. An Italian officer and an Englishman passed, and stood looking down at those men digging in the long trench. “What do you advise?” asked the officer. “She is tormented; here is her last letter. Nothing will satisfy her unless I find him. I have tried every way; there is no trace, no record. He may have been among those burned or carried out to sea the first days; he may be in that trench. What would you do?” “Find him,” said the Englishman, “or another in his place, and put up a stone to him. Then she can have a place to lay her flowers and to weep; it’s not his bones, but his memory--” They passed out of earshot. We moved to another part of the upper terrace and watched half a dozen men take up the flat stone covers of a row of tombs, sunk under the marble pavement. “What are they doing?” Patsy asked.