Gigi looked round.  He did not sob now, but set up a hideous roar, the big tears coursing down his fat cheeks, marking their course by furrows in the dirt and grime.  The wood echoed to Gigi’s roars.  He roared for mammy, for daddy (Angelo Gigi cannot say, it is too long a word).  He kicked away the flowers with his pretty dimpled feet, the false flowers that had betrayed him.  The babe cannot reason, but instinct tells him that those painted leaves have wronged him.  They are faded now, and lie soiled and crumpled, the ghosts of what they were.  Again Gigi tries to rise and run, but he is drawn roughly down by the grass rope.  He tries to tear it asunder, in vain; Angelo had taken care of that.  At last, hoarse and weary, Gigi subsided into terrible sobs, that heave his little breast.  Sobbing thus, with pouting lips and heavy eyes, he waits his fate.

It comes with Angelo!—­Angelo, leaping downward through the checkered glades, his pockets stuffed with chestnuts.  Like an angel with healing in his wings, Angelo comes to Gigi.  When he spies him out, Gigi rises, unsteady on his little feet—­rises up, forgetting all, and clasps his hands.  When Angelo comes near, and stands beside him, Gigi flings his chubby arms about his neck, and nestles to him.

Angelo, when he sees Gigi’s disfigured face and sodden eyes, feels his conscience prick him.  With his pockets full of chestnuts he pities Gigi; he kisses him, he takes him up, and bears him in his arms quickly toward home.  The happy child closes his weary eyes, and falls asleep on Angelo’s shoulder.  Pipa, when she sees Angelo return—­so careful of his little brother—­praises him, and gives him a new-baked cake.  Gigi can tell no tales, and Angelo is silent.

While Pipa sweeps and sings, Angelo and Gigi are roasting these very chestnuts on a heap of ashes under the window outside.  Enrica sat near them—­a little apart—­on a low wall, that bordered the summit of the cliff.  The zone of mighty mountains rose sharp and clear before her.  It seemed to her as if she had only to stretch out her hand to touch them.  The morning lights rested on them with a fresh glory; the crisp air, laden with a scent of herbs, came circling round, and stirred the curls upon her pretty head.  Enrica wore the same quaintly-cut dress, that swept upon the ground, as when Nobili was there.  She had no other.  All had been burnt in the fire.  Sitting there, she plucked the moss that grew upon the wall, and watched it as it dropped into the abyss.  This was shrouded in deepest shadow.  The rush of the distant river in the valley below was audible.  Enrica raised her head and listened.  That river flowed round the walls of Lucca.  Nobili was there.  Happy river!  Oh, that it would bear her to him on its frothy current!—­Surely her life-path lay straight before her now!—­straight into paradise!  Not a stone is on that path; not a rise, not a fall.