Angiolino lay down at full length and munched his bread and cheese in perfect happiness.  Goneril kept shifting about to get herself into the narrow shadow cast by the split and writhen trunk.

“How aggravating it is!” she cried.  “In England, where there’s no sun, there’s plenty of shade—­and here, where the sun is like a mustard-plaster on one’s back, the leaves are all set edgewise on purpose that they shan’t cast any shadow!”

Angiolino made no answer to this intelligent remark.

“He is going to sleep again!” cried Goneril, stopping her lunch in despair.  “He is going to sleep, and there are no end of things I want to know.  Angiolino!”

“Sissignora,” murmured the boy.

“Tell me about Signor Graziano.”

“He is our padrone; he is never here.”

“But he is coming to-day.  Wake up, Angiolino.  I tell you he is on the way!”

“Between life and death there are so many combinations,” drawled the boy, with Tuscan incredulity and sententiousness.

“Ah!” cried the girl, with a little shiver of impatience.  “Is he young?”

“Che!”

“Is he old, then?”

“Neppure!”

“What is he like?  He must be something.”

“He’s our padrone,” repeated Angiolino, in whose imagination Signor Graziano could occupy no other place.

“How stupid you are!” exclaimed the young English girl.

“May be,” said Angiolino stolidly.

“Is he a good padrone? do you like him?”

“Rather!” The boy smiled, and raised himself on one elbow; his eyes twinkled with good-humored malice.

“My Babbo has much better wine than quel signore,” he said.

“But that is wrong!” cried Goneril, quite shocked.

“Who knows?”

After this, conversation flagged.  Goneril tried to imagine what a great musician could be like:  long hair, of course; her imagination did not get much beyond the hair.  He would, of course, be much older now than his portrait.  Then she watched Angiolino cutting the corn, and learned how to tie the swathes together.  She was occupied in this useful employment when the noise of wheels made them both stop and look over the wall.

“Here’s the padrone!” cried the boy.

“Oh, he is old!” said Goneril; “he is old and brown, like a coffee-bean.”

“To be old and good is better than youth with malice,” suggested Angiolino, by way of consolation.

“I suppose so,” acquiesced Goneril.

Nevertheless she went in to dinner a little disappointed.