“The beans were soon finished,” said Regina, with perfect truth.

“I told you how it would be,” Paoluccio answered.

But Regina knew that the time had come to get Marcello away from the inn if he ever was to leave it alive, and in the afternoon, when Nanna was dozing in her chair in the kitchen and Paoluccio was snoring upstairs, and when she had smoothed Marcello’s pillow, she went out and sat down in front of the house, where there was shade at that hour, though the glare from the dusty road would have blinded weaker eyes than hers.  She sat on the stone seat that ran along the house, and leaned against the rough wall, thinking and scheming, and quite sure that she should find a way.

At first she looked about, while she thought, from the well-known mountains that bounded her world to the familiar arches of the distant aqueduct, from the dry ditch opposite to the burning sky above and the greyish green hillocks below Tivoli.  But by and by she looked straight before her, with a steady, concentrated stare, as if she saw something happening and was watching to see how it would end.

She had found what she wanted, and was quite sure of it; only a few details remained to be settled, such as what was to become of her after she left the inn where she had grown up.  But that did not trouble her much.

She was not delicately nurtured that she should dread the great world of which she knew nothing, nor had Nanna’s conversation during ten years done much to strengthen her in the paths of virtue.  Her pride had done much more and might save her wherever she went, but she was very well aware of life’s evil truths.  And what would her pride be compared with Marcello, the first and only being she had ever loved?  To begin with, she knew that the handsome people from the country earned money by serving as models for painters and sculptors, and she had not the slightest illusion about her own looks.  Since she had been a child people who came to the inn had told her that she was beautiful; and not the rough wine-carters only, for the fox-hunters sometimes came that way, riding slowly homeward after a long run, and many a fine gentleman in pink had said things to her which she had answered sharply, but which she remembered well.  She had not the slightest doubt but that she was one of the handsomest girls in Italy, and the absolute certainty of the conviction saved her from having any small vanity about her looks.  She knew that she had only to show herself and that every one would stand and look at her, only to beckon and she would be followed.  She did not crave admiration; a great beauty rarely does.  She simply defied competition, and was ready to laugh at it in a rather good-natured way, for she knew what she had, and was satisfied.