her.

"You make me think of her, Signora," said the peasant. "You have her
face. If you had her voice, to sing, I should think that you were she,
returned from the dead."

"Could she sing?" asked Gloria, dreamily, as they left the church.

"Like the angels in Paradise," answered Nanna. "I think that now, when
she sings, they are ashamed and stand silent to listen to her. If God
wills that I make a good death, I shall hear her again."

She glanced at her companion's dreamy, fateful face.

"Let us not speak of the dead!" she concluded. "To-day we will make
gnocchi of polenta."

CHAPTER XXXIX.

IN the afternoon Gloria called Sora Nanna to move the chest against
which she had stumbled in the morning. It would be more convenient, she
said, to put it under the bed, if it could not be taken away altogether.
It was a big, old-fashioned chest of unpainted, unvarnished wood, brown
with age, and fastened by a hasp, through which a splinter of white
chestnut wood had been stuck instead of a padlock. Gloria saw that it
was heavy, as Sora Nanna dragged it and pushed it across the room. She
remarked that, if it held only clothes, it must be packed very full.

Sora Nanna, glad to rest from her efforts, stood upright with her hand
on her hip and took breath.

"Signora," she said, "who knows what is in it? Things, certain things!
There are the clothes of that poor girl. This I know. And then, certain
other things. Who knows what is in it? It may be a thousand years since
I looked. Signora, shall we open it? But I think there are certain
things that belonged to the Englishman."

"The Englishman?" asked Gloria, with some curiosity.

She was glad of anything which could interest her a little. For the
moment she had not yet the courage to begin to write again after
Reanda's message. Anything which had power to turn the current of her
thoughts was a relief. She was sitting in the same chair beside the
cradle in which she had sat in the morning, for she had called Nanna to
move the box at a time when the child had been taken out for its second
airing. She leaned back, resting her auburn hair against the bare wall,
the waxen whiteness of her face contrasting with the bluish whitewash.

"What Englishman?" she asked again, wearily, but with a show of interest
in her half-closed eyes.

"Who knows? An Englishman. They called him Sor Angoscia." Nanna sat down
on the heavy box, and dropped her skinny hands far apart upon her kn