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filled her eyes as she sat down at the little table in the window and began to write. "You have sent me a tea equipage fit for an empress! It is perfect, and I do not know how to thank you. Yes. I forgive you for writing. Have I really helped you to play? I am so glad. You say Chopin, so I suppose it is the piano? I must tell you that I remember all the stories you told me of Siena, and they add to the interest of my days. I give English lessons, and am making enough money to keep myself, but in the intervals of grammar and '_I Promessi Sposi_' (no less than three of my pupils are translating that interminable romance into so-called English) I study the architecture of the early Renaissance in the old narrow streets, and gaze upon Byzantine Madonnas in the churches. The Duomo is an archangel's dream, and I like to go there with my cousins and steep my soul in its beauty while they say their prayers and fan themselves. One of them is pretty and she hates me; the other two are stout and kind and empty-headed, and their aunt is nothing--a large, heavy nothing--" Olive laid down her pen. "What will he think if I write him eight pages? That I want to begin a correspondence? I do, but he must not know it." She tore her letter up into small pieces and wrote two lines on a sheet of note-paper. "Thank you very much for your kind present and for what you say. Of course I forgive you ... and I shall not forget.--Yours sincerely, OLIVE AGAR." She went to the window and threw the torn scraps of the first letter out into the street, and then she sat down again and began to cry; not for long. Women who know how precious youth is understand that tears are an expensive luxury, and they are sparing of them accordingly. They suffer more in the stern repression of their emotions than do those who yield easily to grief, but they keep their eyelashes and their complexions. Olive bathed her eyes presently and smoked a cigarette to calm her nerves. She was going out that evening to dine with her favourite pupil and his mother, and she knew they would be distressed if she looked ill or sad. Aurelia de Sanctis had had troubles enough of her own. She had married a patriot, a man with a beautiful eager face and a body spent with disease, and a fever that never left him since the days when he lurked in the marshes of the Maremma, c
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