"Get out, get out!" said Giovanna again impatiently, and Brontu, seeing that instead of being amused, she was out of humour, asked her if she had had a bad dream. She remembered the one she had told her mother of, and made no reply.
In this way they came to the other side of the village; that is, to the part where Isidoro Pane lived. A spectacle of indescribable loveliness lay spread before them. The moon, like a great golden face, gazed down from the silver-blue west; and the black earth, the wet trees, the slate-stone houses, the clumps of bushes, and the wild stretch of upland—everything, as far as the eye could reach, to the very utmost confines of the horizon, seemed bathed in a tender, half-tearful smile. The two young people passed close by the fisherman's hut; they could hear him singing. Brontu stopped.
"Come on," said Giovanna, dragging him by the arm.
"Wait a moment; I want to knock on the thing he calls his door."
"No," she said, trembling. "Come away, come on, I tell you; if you don't come, I'll leave you by yourself."
"Oh! yes, that's true; you and he have had a quarrel; I haven't, though; I'm going to knock on his door."
"I'm going on, then."
"He was singing the lauds of San Costantino," said Brontu, as he rejoined her a few moments later. "The one the saint gave him on the river-bank that time. That old man is stark mad."