“Who is the man?”
“Hush! I don’t know. Do you hear the beating of a drum? One of the Contrade is coming.”
The two girls ran to the window, and Olive opened the green shutters a little way that they might see out without being seen. The day of the Palio was close at hand, and the pages and alfieri of the rival parishes, whose horses were to run in the race, were already going about the town. Olive never tired of watching the flash of bright colours as the flags were flung up and deftly caught again, and she cried out now with pleasure as the little procession moved leisurely across the piazza.
“I wonder why they come here,” Carmela said, as the first alfiero let the heavy folds of silk ripple about his head, twisted the staff, seemed to drop it, and gathered it to him again easily with his left hand. The page stood aside with a grave assumption of the gilded graces of the thirteenth century. He was handsome in his dress of green and white and scarlet velvet.
“Why does he look up here?”
Olive laughed a little. “He is the son of the cobbler who mends my boots,” she whispered. “He is trying to learn English and I have lent him some books, and that is why he has come to do us honour. I think it is charming of him.”
She took a white magnolia blossom from a glass dish on her table. “Shall I be mediæval too?”
The boy raised smiling eyes as the pale flower came fluttering down to him. One of the alfieri laughed aloud.
“O Romeo, sei bello!”
“Son’ felice!” he answered, and he kissed the waxen petals ardently.