At the corner of the squalid, ill-smelling street through which she is now passing, is the town fountain.  This fountain, once a willful mountain-torrent, now cruelly captured and borne hither by municipal force, splashes downward through a sculptured circle cut in a marble slab, into a covered trough below.  Here bold-eyed maidens are gathered, who poise copper vessels on their dark heads—­maidens who can chat, and laugh, and romp, on holidays, and with flushed faces dance wild tarantellas (fingers for castanets), where the old tale of love is told in many a subtile step, and shuffle, rush, escape, and feint, ending in certain capture!  Beside the maidens linger some mountain lads.  Now their work is over, they loll against the wall, pipe in mouth, or lie stretched on a plot of grass that grows green under the spray of the fountain.  In a dark angle, a little behind from these, there is a shrine hollowed out of the city wall.  Within the shrine an image of the Holy Mother of the Seven Sorrows stands, her arms outstretched, her bosom pierced by seven gilded arrows.  The shrine is protected by an iron grating.  Bunches of pale hill-side blossoms, ferns, and a few blades of corn, are thrust in between the bars.  Some lie at the Virgin’s feet—­offerings from those who have nothing else to give.  A little group (but these are old, and bowed by grief and want) kneel beside the shrine in the quiet evening-tide.

The rumble of a carriage, so strange a sound in lonely Corellia, rouses all.  From year to year, no wheels pass through the town save the marchesa’s.  Ere she appears, all know who it must be.  The kneelers at the shrine start up and hobble forward to stare and wonder at that strange world whence she comes, so far away at Lucca.  The maidens courtesy and smile; the lads jump up, and range themselves respectfully against the wall; yet in their hearts neither care for her—­neither the maidens nor the lads—­no one cares for the marchesa.  They are all looking out for Enrica.  Why does the signorina lie back in the carriage a mass of clothes?  The maidens would like to see how those clothes are made, to cut their poor garments something like them.  The lads would like to let their eyes rest on her golden hair.  Why does the Signorina Enrica not nod and smile to those she knows, as is her wont?  Has that old tyrant, her aunt—­these young ones are bold, and dare to whisper what others think; they have no care, and, like the lilies of the field, live in the wild, free air—­has that old tyrant, her aunt, bewitched her?

Now the carriage has emerged from the dark alley, and entered the dirty but somewhat less dark piazza—­the market-place of Corellia.  The old Lombard church of Santa Barbara, with its big bells in the arched tower, hanging plainly to be seen, opens into the piazza by a flight of steps and a sculptured doorway.  The Municipio, too, calling itself a palace (heaven save the mark!), with its list of births, deaths,