is not my business. I would rather
look at the Englishman when he is eating meat than at Sister Maria when
she is counting clothes! I do not know whether he is a wolf or a man."

"Eh! The Englishman!" exclaimed Sora Nanna. "You will look so much at
the Englishman that you will make blood with Gigetto, who wishes you
well, and when Gigetto has waited for the Englishman at the corner of
the forest, what shall we all have? The galleys. What do you see in the
Englishman? He has red hair and long, long teeth. Yes--just like a wolf.
You are right. And if he pays for meat, why should he not eat it? If he
did not pay, it would be different. It would soon be finished. Heaven
send us a little money without any Englishman! Besides, Gigetto said the
other day that he would wait for him at the corner of the forest. And
Gigetto, when he says a thing, he does it."

"And why should we go to the galleys if Gigetto waits for the
Englishman?" inquired Annetta.

"Silly!" cried the older woman. "Because Gigetto would take your
father's gun, since he has none of his own. That would be enough. We
should have done it!"

Annetta shrugged her shoulders and said nothing.

"But take care," continued Sora Nanna. "Your father sleeps with one eye
open. He sees you, and he sees also the Englishman every day. He says
nothing, because he is good. But he has a fist like a paving-stone. I
tell you nothing more."

They reached Sora Nanna's house and disappeared under the dark archway.
For Sora Nanna and Stefanone, her husband, were rich people for their
station, and their house was large and was built with an arch wide
enough and high enough for a loaded beast of burden to pass through with
a man on its back. And, within, everything was clean and well kept,
excepting all that belonged to Annetta. There were airy upper rooms,
with well-swept floors of red brick or of beaten cement, furnished with
high beds on iron trestles, and wooden stools of well-worn brown oak,
and tables painted a vivid green, and primitive lithographs of Saint
Benedict and Santa Scholastica and the Addolorata. And there were lofts
in which the rich autumn grapes were hung up to dry on strings, and
where chestnuts lay in heaps, and figs were spread in symmetrical order
on great sheets of the coarse grey paper made in Subiaco. There were
apples, too, though poor ones, and there were bins of maize and wheat,
waiting to be picked over before being ground in the primeval household