t, in Italy! She gave him food; maize-bread
and wine, sometimes meat; sometimes a bottle of good wine. When my
father thinks of it he cries, if there is gin smelling near him. At
last my father had to stop there day and night. Then that good woman's
daughter came to him to keep him from starving; she risked being
stripped naked and beaten with rods, to keep my father from starving.
When my father speaks of Sandra now, it makes my mother--she does not
like it. I am named after her: Emilia Alessandra Belloni. 'Sandra' is
short for it. She did not know why I was christened that, and will never
call me anything but Emilia, though my father says Sandra, always.
My father never speaks of that dear Sandra herself, except when he is
tipsy. Once I used to wish him to be tipsy; for then I used to sit at my
piano while he talked, and I made all his words go into music. One night
I did it so well, my father jumped right up from his chair, shouting
'Italia!' and he caught his wig off his head, and threw it into the
fire, and rushed out into the street quite bald, and people thought him
mad.

"It was the beginning of all our misfortunes! My father was taken and
locked up in a place as a tipsy man. That he has never forgiven the
English for! It has made me and my mother miserable ever since. My
mother is sure it is all since that night. Do you know, I remember,
though I was so young, that I felt the music--oh! like a devil in my
bosom? Perhaps it was, and it passed out of me into him. Do you think it
was?"

Wilfrid answered: "Well, no! I shouldn't think you had anything to
do with the devil." Indeed, he was beginning to think her one of the
smallest of frocked female essences.

"I lost my piano through it," she went on. "I could not practise. I was
the most miserable creature in all the world till I fell in love with
my harp. My father would not play to get money. He sat in his chair, and
only spoke to ask about meal-time, and we had no money for food, except
by selling everything we had. Then my piano went. So then I said to my
mother, I will advertize to give lessons, as other people do, and make
money for us all, myself. So we paid money for a brass-plate, and our
landlady's kind son put it up on the door for nothing, and we waited for
pupils to come. I used to pray to the Virgin that she would blessedly
send me pupils, for my poor mother's complaints were so shrill and out
of tune it's impossible to tell you what I suffered. Bu