a
that had killed the singer.

"Will they burn me if I sing too well?" the child asked him this day,
the words of Joconda being with her.

"Oh, that is sure," said Andreino, half in jest and half in earnest.
"They burnt him because he sang better than all of them. So they said.
I do not know. I know the resin ran out of the pinewood all golden and
hissing and his heart would not burn, all we could do. You are a female
thing, Musa; your heart will be the first to burn, the first of all!"

"Will it?" said Musa seriously, but not any way alarmed, for the thought
of that flaming pile by the seashore by night was a familiar image to
her.

"Ay, for sure; you will be a woman!" said Andreino, hammering into his
boat.

* * *

"Though there is not a soul here, still sometimes they come--Lucchese,
Pistoiese, what not--they come as they go; they are a faithless lot;
they love all winter, and while the corn is in the ear it goes well, but
after harvest--phew!--they put their gains in their pockets and they are
off and away back to their mountains. There are broken hearts in Maremma
when the threshing is done."

"Yes," said Musa again.

It was nothing to her, and she heeded but little.

"Yes, because men speak too lightly and women hearken too quickly; that
is how the mischief is born. With the autumn the mountaineers come. They
are strong and bold; they are ruddy and brown; they work all day, but in
the long nights they dance and they sing; then the girl listens. She
thinks it is all true, though it has all been said before in his own
hills to other ears. The winter nights are long, and the devil is always
near; when the corn goes down and the heat is come there is another sad
soul the more, another burden to carry, and he--he goes back to the
mountains. What does he care? Only when he comes down into the plains
again he goes to another place to work, because men do not love women's
tears. That is how it goes in Maremma."

* * *

"So the saints will pluck her to themselves at last," thought Joconda;
and the dreariness, the lovelessness, the hopelessness of such an
existence did not occur to her, because age, which has learned the
solace and sweetness of peace, never remembers that to youth peace seems
only stagnation, inanition, death.

The exhausted swimmer, reaching the land, falls prone on it, and blesses
it; but the outgoing swimmer, full of strength, spurns the land, and
on