of Monte Amato to welcome the
forestieri.

The music grew louder, and presently a dog barked outside on the terrace.
Lucrezia ran to the window. A great white-and-yellow, blunt-faced,
pale-eyed dog, his neck surrounded by a spiked collar, stood there
sniffing and looking savage, his feathery tail cocked up pugnaciously
over his back.

"Sebastiano!" called Lucrezia, leaning out of the window under the
awning--"Sebastiano!"

Then she drew back laughing, and squatted down on the floor, concealed by
the window-seat. The sound of the pipes increased till their rough drone
seemed to be in the room, bidding a rustic defiance to its whiteness and
its silence. Still squatting on the floor, Lucrezia called out once more:

"Sebastiano!"

Abruptly the tune ceased and the silence returned, emphasized by the
vanished music. Lucrezia scarcely breathed. Her face was flushed, for she
was struggling against an impulse to laugh, which almost overmastered
her. After a minute she heard the dog's short bark again, then a man's
foot shifting on the terrace, then suddenly a noise of breathing above
her head close to her hair. With a little scream she shrank back and
looked up. A man's face was gazing down at her. It was a very brown and
very masculine face, roughened by wind and toughened by sun, with keen,
steady, almost insolent eyes, black and shining, stiff, black hair, that
looked as if it had been crimped, a mustache sprouting above a wide,
slightly animal mouth full of splendid teeth, and a square, brutal, but
very manly chin. On the head was a Sicilian cap, long and hanging down
at the left side. There were ear-rings in the man's large, well-shaped
ears, and over the window-ledge protruded the swollen bladder, like a
dead, bloated monster, from which he had been drawing his antique tune.

He stared down at Lucrezia with a half-contemptuous humor, and she up at
him with a wide-eyed, unconcealed adoration. Then he looked curiously
round the room, with a sharp intelligence that took in every detail in a
moment.

"Per Dio!" he ejaculated. "Per Dio!"

He looked at Lucrezia, folded his brawny arms on the window-sill, and
said:

"They've got plenty of soldi."

Lucrezia nodded, not without personal pride.

"Gaspare says--"

"Oh, I know as much as Gaspare," interrupted Sebastiano, brusquely. "The
signora is my friend. When she was here before I saw her many times. But
for me she would never have taken the Casa del Prete."

"W