hing."

"It would be a much more terrible thing if it were a girl who
disobeyed," Matteo growled. He did not like that girls should
criticise men.

"So it would," the girl responded, with meek readiness.

"I don't know why I feel so tired to-day," the mother said, sinking
into a chair again. "My bones ache as if I had been working in the
vineyard all day."

"You are not ill, mamma?" exclaimed Silvia, blushing with alarm.

The answer was a hesitating one: "I don't see what can ail me. It
wouldn't be anything, only that I am so tired without having done
much."

"Perhaps it's the weather, mamma," Silvia suggested.

Gentle as she was, she had adopted the ruthless and ungrateful Italian
custom of ascribing every ache and pain of the body to some almost
imperceptible change in their too beautiful weather. The smallest
cloud goes laden with more accusations than it holds drops of rain,
and the ill winds that blow nobody any good blow through those shining
skies from morning till night and from night till morning again.

The Sora Guai was sicker than she dreamed. It was not the summer sun
that scorched her so, nor the _scirocco_ that made her head so heavy.
What malaria she had found to breathe on the mountain-top it would be
hard to say; but the dreaded _perniciosa_ had caught her in its grasp,
and she was doomed. The fever burned fiercely for a few days, and when
it was quenched there was nothing left but ashes.

And thus died the only earthly thing to which Sister Silvia's heart
clung. The mother had been stern, but the daughter was too submissive
to need correction. She had never had any will of her own, except to
love and obey. Collision between them was therefore impossible, and
the daughter felt as a frail plant growing under a shadowing tree
might feel if the tree were cut down. She was bare to every wind that
blew. She had no companions of her own age--she had no companion of
any age, in fact--and she had not been accustomed to think for herself
in the smallest thing.

She had got bent into a certain shape, however, and her brother and
sister felt quite safe on her account. Everybody knew that she was to
be a nun of the Perpetual Adoration; that she was soon to go to the
convent of Santa Maria Maddalena on the Quirinal in Rome; and that,
once entered there, she would never again see a person from outside.
The town's-people were accustomed to the wall of silence and seclusion
which had already grown up abou