Tuttu was not killed, however. The cut was sewn up, while the ox-cart with its good-natured driver waited outside, and the depressed party returned home, grandmother Maddalena clasping her little earthen pot full of hot wood ashes, which even in the excitement of the accident she had not forgotten to take with her, for it was a cold day in early springtime.[A]
[A] A scaldino, carried about by all the Siennese women, and used in the house instead of a fire.
Tutti was allowed to ride home in the cart, and sat holding Tuttu's hand, his eyes round with solemnity, the traces of tears still on his cheeks.
That night he went to sleep with his arm thrown round Tuttu's neck, his curly head resting against his shoulder—and though Tuttu was cramped and uncomfortable, and his thumb pained him, he remained heroically still until he also dropped asleep, and the two little brothers dreamed peacefully of pleasant things until the morning.
CHAPTER II.
"Well, thank Heaven! those children are safe for the present," said Maddalena, as she sat on a stone bench in the sun, with the dark clipped cyprus hedge behind her.
To the right rose the stuccoed Palazzo, with its great stone coat-of-arms hanging over the entrance, and inside, a peep of the shady courtyard, with green tubs of orange trees, and the twinkle of a fountain that shot up high into the sunshine, and fell with a splash into a marble basin.
Maddalena, in her broad Tuscan hat with its old-fashioned black velvet—for she would never give in to the modern innovations of flowers and ostrich feathers—held her distaff in her hand, and as she twisted the spindle and drew out the thread evenly, she thought with satisfaction of the improved behaviour of the twins.