“Then your mother is dead too?” Roderigo asked respectfully.

“When I was a little girl, and when Beppino was a tiny baby.  Beppi is my little brother,” Lucia explained.

Roderigo’s eyes were shining with delight.  There was something in Lucia’s soft tones that filled his homesick heart with joy.  She was so different from most of the girls from the north, with their strange high voices and unfriendly manners.  If she wasn’t exactly from the south she was near it.  He wanted to sit down beside her and tell her all about his home and his family, for he was very young and very homesick, but Lucia decreed otherwise.

“Now do see what you have done,” she scolded suddenly.  “You have kept me talking here until the sun is well down, and I will have to hurry if I want to see Maria and return home before Nana misses me.  So much for gabbing on the high road with some one who should be watching for suspicious spies instead of asking questions,” she finished with a provoking toss of her head.

Which sentence, considering that she had asked the first questions herself, was unjust.  Roderigo, however, did not seem to resent the blame laid upon him.  He did not even offer to contradict, but watched Lucia until she disappeared around a corner a few streets beyond the gate, and then he turned resolutely about and scanned the road with searching determination, as if he really believed that the open, smiling country about him might be concealing a spy.

When Lucia disappeared around the comer of the narrow street that led to the market place, she stopped long enough to laugh softly to herself.

“The great silly!  He took all the blame himself instead of boxing my ears for being impertinent.  A fine soldier he’ll make!  If I can scare him, what will the guns do?” she said aloud, and then with a roguish gleam of mischief in her eyes she hurried on.

The narrow side streets through which she passed were almost deserted, but when she reached the market place it was thronged with people.  Every one was out to look at the new troops, and in the little square the great white umbrellas over the market stalls were surrounded by soldiers.  Their picturesque uniforms added a gala note to the commonplace little scene.

Lucia elbowed her way through the jostling, laughing men to a certain umbrella, a little to one side of the open space left clear before the church.

CHAPTER II

MARIA

A neatly-dressed, dumpy little woman in a black dress and shawl sat beneath it, and behind a row of stone crocks beside her was a young girl several years older than Lucia, who ladled out cupfuls of the milk that the crocks contained, and gave them, always accompanied by a shy little smile, to the soldiers in return for their pennies.  She was Maria Rudini, Lucia’s cousin, a pretty, gentle-featured girl with shy, bewildered eyes.