"Oh," sighed Nancy, looking at him and clasping puerile hands, "your beauty aches me!"
Aldo quite understood it, and was pleased.
They went for long walks to Premeno and San Salvatore; as Clarissa refused to accompany them, Carlo chaperoned them, blandly bored.
Soon Valeria arrived. Nancy went down to meet her at the landing-place, looking ethereal and pink as a spray of apple-blossom. Valeria kissed her with hot tears. "Oh! my baby, my baby!" she said, and wished that the seventeen years were a dream, and that her child's small head were still safely nestling at her breast. In Nancy's young love she lived the days of her own betrothal over again, and Tom arose in her memory and was with her day and night. On this same silky blue lake Tom had so often rowed her with Zio Giacomo, in a little boat called Luisa. She tearfully begged Nancy and Aldo to come with her and see if they could not find that very self-same boat.
They found, indeed, three Luisas, but Valeria could not recognize them; still, all three of the boatmen declared that they remembered her perfectly, and got the expected tip.
"Of course," said Valeria, deeply moved, "it cannot have been all three of them."
And Aldo said: "You should not have given them anything. They were none of them more than twenty-five years old." Whereupon Valeria sighed deeply.
Then it was decided that they should go in reverent pilgrimage to the Madonna del Monte, where Nancy's father had asked Nancy's mother to marry him. The road was lined with beggars: shouting cripples, exhibiting sores and stumps.
"Some of these are very old," sighed Valeria. "I am sure they were here that day, and must have seen me."
"I shall give a franc to every one of them," said Nancy, taking out her small fat purse, as the first one-armed mendicant held out his greasy hat.