s he climbed up through the
trees to the sirens' house, he sometimes longed to strike him. And when
Maurice went away with Gaspare in the night towards the white road where
Tito, tied to a stake, was waiting to carry the empty pannier that had
contained a supper up the mountain to the house of the priest, Salvatore
stood handling his money, and murmuring:

"Maledetto straniero! Madonna! Ma io sono piu birbante di Lei, mille
volte piu birbante, Dio mio!"

And he laughed as he went towards the sirens' house. It amused him to
think that a stranger, an "Inglese," fancied that he could play with a
Sicilian, who had never been "worsted," even by one of his own
countrymen.

XV

Maurice had begun to dread the arrival of the post. Artois was rapidly
recovering his strength, and in each of her letters Hermione wrote with a
more glowing certainty of her speedy return to Sicily, bringing the
invalid with her. Would they come before June 11th, the day of the fair?
That was the question which preoccupied Maurice, which began to haunt
him, and set a light of anxiety in his eyes when he saw Antonino climbing
up the mountain-side with the letter-bag slung over his shoulder. He felt
as if he could not forego this last festa. When it was over, when the
lights had gone out in the houses of San Felice, and the music was
silent, and the last rocket had burst in the sky, showering down its
sparks towards the gaping faces of the peasants, he would be ready to
give up this free, unintellectual life, this life in which his youth ran
wild. He would resign himself to the inevitable, return to the existence
in which, till now, he had found happiness, and try to find it there once
more, try to forget the strange voices that had called him, the strange
impulses that had prompted him. He would go back to his old self, and
seek pleasure in the old paths, where he walked with those whom society
would call his "equals," and did not spend his days with men who wrung
their scant livelihood from the breast of the earth and from the breast
of the sea, with women whose eyes, perhaps, were full of flickering
fires, but who had never turned the leaves of a printed book, or traced a
word upon paper. He would sit again at the feet of people who were
cleverer and more full of knowledge than himself, and look up to them
with reverence.

But he must have his festa first. He counted upon that. He desired that
so strongly, almost so fiercely, that he felt as