“Are you very hungry, little one?” Lucia asked gently.  “I should have brought bread with me, but I did not think.”

Beppi giggled, and from the pocket of his little tunic he produced the pink paper bag.

“Two left,” he announced as he opened it, “and both long ones.  Here’s yours and here’s mine.  Garibaldi’s been eating grass all day, so she’s not hungry.”

Lucia accepted the candy, and they both had a drink of milk.  Then Beppi snuggled down in his sister’s arms and his eyelids grew heavy.

“Go on with that story,” he said, “the one about the soldier at the gate.”

Lucia smiled in the dark and hugged him tight.  The guns were silent, and only occasional peals of thunder broke the stillness.

“Well, one day,” she began, “a very cross girl came to the gate, and the soldier who was always on the lookout for the stolen princess stopped her and spoke to her.  But the cross girl was feeling very mean indeed, and she teased the soldier and made him very unhappy.  But later on in the afternoon she was ashamed, and so she found the nice girl who was really the stolen princess, and took her with her to the gate, and the soldier—­”

Lucia broke off and sat up suddenly to listen.  A queer “rat, tat, tat,” detached itself from the other night noises.  Beppi was sound asleep, and she rolled him gently into the nest of leaves, then she listened again.  The sound came again.

“Rat, tat, tat.”  It was a sharp staccato hammering, muffled by the wall of rock behind her.

She stood up and crept softly to the mouth of the cave.

The wind and the rain made such a noise that she could hear nothing, and it was already too dark to distinguish anything but the vaguest outlines.  She crept back into the shelter, believing that she had just imagined what she had heard, but she had not taken her place beside Beppi before she heard it again—­a persistent “rat, tat, tat,” too metallic and too regular to be accounted for by a natural cause.

Lucia’s mind was alert at once.  She put her ear up against the rock and listened again.  Muffled sounds too indistinct to recognize came to her.  Whatever they were, they were not far off, and right in a line with the back of the cave.

Lucia thought of several explanations, but could accept none of them.  She tried to argue against her fears by saying over and over again that if it was a sound made by men, those men were surely Italian soldiers, but her arguments could not still the frightened beating of her heart, as the voice became more distinct.  She was filled with terror.

Rumors of underground tunnels and mines blowing off whole mountain tops, that she had heard from the soldiers, came back to her and left her cold with fear.

Beppi had rolled over beside the goat for warmth, and was sleeping soundly.  Lucia looked at him and then went once more to the mouth of the cave.