Without exactly meaning to, Maria dropped the flower she was wearing in her bodice.  Roderigo caught it and tucked it, Neapolitan fashion, behind his ear, then he blew a kiss to Maria and marched on.

Lucia watched the little scene.  She was half amused and half contemptuous.  Her little heart under its gay bodice was filled with a fine hate that left no room for pretty romance.

CHAPTER IV

LOST

When the soldiers had climbed out of sight into the mountains, Maria walked slowly back to find her mother, and Lucia after a hurried good-by ran home to tell Nana and Beppino the news.

She was far more worried over the possible order to evacuate than she would admit.  As their cottage was the farthest north on the road, it would be the nearest to the Austrian guns.  Personally Lucia scorned the very idea of the Austrian guns, but she could not help realizing the danger to Nana and Beppino and Garibaldi.  She was still undecided what to do when she reached the cottage.

Nana Rudini was standing in the doorway, shading her eyes with her withered old hand, and staring intently in the direction that the soldiers had taken.

“Did you see the troops, Nana?” Lucia asked cheerfully.  “They were a fine lot, eh?  I guess they will be able to stop the enemy from coming any nearer.”

“Nearer?” queried Nana, “what are you saying?”

“We have had bad luck,” Lucia explained.  “Tavola has been captured, and our soldiers are retreating.  In town they say we may have to evacuate before to-morrow.”

The old woman received the news without comment, but a look of despair came into her usually bright eyes, and for the moment made them tragic.  Long years before, when Austria had crossed the mountains and entered Cellino, she had been a young girl.  Now in her old age they were to come again, and there was no reason to hope that this time they would be less brutal in their triumph than they had been formerly.  The memory of their brutality was still a vivid one.

“We will leave at once,” she said at last, and her decision was so unexpected, that Lucia gasped in surprise.

“Leave?  But, Nana, where will we go?  What will become of our things?” she exclaimed.  “Surely we had better wait at least until we are ordered out.”

“No, we will leave at once,” Nana replied firmly.  “The order may come too late, as it did before.  What do those boys who swagger about in men’s places know about the enemy?  There is not one that can remember them.  But I, old Nana, have known them and their ways, and I say we must go at once.”

Lucia looked at the new light of determination in her grandmother’s eyes, and realized with a shock of surprise that to protest would be useless.

“Where is Beppi?” she asked.  “I will go and find him.”

“With the goats,” Nana replied.  “Call him, I will go in and start packing.”