na a white boat with a green line put off. It was
rowed by Gaspare, who wore his festa suit, and it contained two people,
a man and a women, who had that morning been quietly married.

Another boat preceded theirs, going towards the island, but it was so
far ahead of them that they could only see it as a moving dot upon the
shining sea, when they rounded the breakwater and set their course for
the point of land where lies the Antico Giuseppone.

Gaspare rowed standing up, with his back towards Hermione and Artois
and his great eyes staring steadily out to sea. He plied the oars
mechanically. During the first few minutes of the voyage to the island
his mind was far away. He was a boy in Sicily once more, waiting proudly
upon his first, and indeed his only, Padrona in the Casa del Prete
on Monte Amato. Then she was quite alone. He could see her sitting at
evening upon the terrace with a book in her lap, gazing out across the
ravine and the olive-covered mountain slopes to the waters that kissed
the shore of the Sirens' Isle. He could see her, when night fell,
going slowly up the steps into the lighted cottage, and turning on its
threshold to wish him "Buon riposo."

Then there was an interval--and she came again. He was waiting at the
station of Cattaro. Outside stood the little train of donkeys, decorated
with flowers under his careful supervision. Upon Monte Amato, in the
Casa del Prete, everything was in readiness for the arrival of the
Padrona--and the Padrone. For this time his Padrona was not to be alone.
And the train came in, thundering along by the sea, and he saw a brown
eager face looking out of a window--a face which at once had seemed
familiar to him almost as if he had always known it in Sicily.

And the new and wonderful period of his boy's life began.

But it passed, and in the early morning he stood in the corner of the
Campo Santo where Protestants were buried, and threw flowers from his
father's terreno into an open grave.

And once more his Padrona was alone.

Far away from Sicily, from his "Paese," among the great woods of the
Abetone he received for the first time into his untutored arms his
Padroncina. His Padrone was gone from him forever. But once more, as he
would have expressed it to a Sicilian comrade, they were "in three." And
still another period began.

And now that period was ended.

As Gaspare rowed slowly on towards the island, in his simple and yet
shrewd way he was pondering o