“Pancrazia was not one of the melancholy who must cry when they pray. She thought it no wrong to smile at the Madonna; and I have seen her run out of school in the summer days, and blow kisses to the Mother of God—where the shrine is by the gateway of the village—as a child might to her own mother coming down to meet her over the rocks, with, maybe, the little pig trotting alongside. Why not, signore? She had confidence in the Madonna; and what is more beautiful than the confidence which runs out of a young heart like a stream out of a hazel wood? The Madonna loved it, you may be sure. “As Pancrazia grew up, despite her piety—she was the purest-minded child I ever blessed—the natural feelings grew with her. They come early, signore, in sunny places; and, thank God, the sun is never long away from us here. She began to know there’s a life for a maiden that follows after the child’s life. “Ah, signore, I watched over the girl as I have watched over a flower growing in my little garden—you must see my little garden, signore, before you go. “Often I thought: ‘What a mother she will make!’ And sometimes I would run over the boys of the village to choose a husband for her when she should be a bit older. But somehow it always ended the same way: I never could settle on the husband. “Well, signore, you know what girls are. She didn’t wait for me to choose, though nobody respected me as she did. She didn’t think so much of herself as I thought of her. And while I was saying to myself: ‘Giovanni won’t do, and Stefano won’t do, and Paolo’s not the one, and may the Madonna preserve her from Giorgio!’ she says to herself: ‘Angelo!’ Not a word more, you may be certain. I can hear her say it, and see her lips smiling over the word—‘Angelo!’ “I’d come to him, in my numbering, and I’d said to myself: ‘Angelo won’t quite do.’ Not that he was a bad boy. And he was a handsome one; strong, merry, and could play the guitar and dance the tarantella, and sing ‘O sole mio!’ till you could hear it from Acireale to Capo Sant’ Alessio pretty near. But— Well, in my eyes, nobody would do for Pancrazia. “In her heart, all the same, she chose Angelo, and it seemed that in his he chose her. When I saw him with her one twilight by the shrine at the gateway, and saw her kneel down, while he stood beside her, and crossed himself and looked at her as she was praying—for him, signore, you may be sure, knowing women—I understood how it was, and I said to myself: ‘Perhaps the Madonna has done the numbering too, and stopped at Angelo.’ “And so I left it, trusting all was right for that pure child, even in this world of sin.