ean agricultural populations live upon vegetable food,
like the majority of Eastern Asiatics, and with the same result. Hard
labour produces hard muscles, but vegetable food yields a low vital
tension, so to say. Soldiers know it well enough. The pale-faced city
clerk who eats meat twice a day will out-fight and out-last and
out-starve the burly labourer whose big thews and sinews are mostly
compounded of potatoes, corn, and water.

The girl crept up the stairs stealthily to her lonely little room, and
lay down to die upon her bed, as though that were the only thing to be
done under the circumstances. It never occurred to her to go to her
mother and tell her what had happened and what she suspected, any more
than it had suggested itself to Sor Tommaso to lay information against
her for having stabbed him. If her father had been at home, she might
perhaps have gone to him and told him with her dying breath that the
doctor had killed her, and that Stefanone must avenge her. But he was
away. She was stronger than her mother and had always dominated her. She
knew also that if she complained, Sora Nanna would raise such a scream
as would bring half Subiaco running to the house. The girl's animal
instinct was to die alone, and quietly. So she made no sound, and lay
upon her bed writhing in pain and holding her sides with all her might,
but with close-set teeth and silent lips.

Looked at from the point of view of fact, it was all ridiculous enough.
The girl had been all day in the hot autumn sun, had eaten a quantity of
over-ripe figs and grapes, which might have upset the digestion of an
ostrich, had tired even her strong limbs with the final walk home, and
had then, at Sor Tommaso's house, swallowed nearly a quart of ice-cold
water. It was not surprising that she should be very ill. It was not
even strange that the theory of poison should suggest itself. To her it
was tragedy, and meant nothing less than death, when she lay down upon
her bed.

Between the spasms all sorts of things passed through her mind, when her
head lay still upon the pillow. Chiefly and particularly her thoughts
were filled with hatred of Sor Tommaso, and a sort of doglike longing to
see Dalrymple's face before she died. She was still fascinated by the
vision of his red hair and bright blue eyes which came back to her
vividly, with the careless smile his hard face had for her
half-childish, half-malicious sayings. And with the thought of him came
al