She looked, frowning, round the empty room.
'There is nothing to do anything with—or I'd set to work right away.'
'Ecco, Signora!' said the farmer's wife. She carried triumphantly in her hands a shaky carpet-chair, the only article of luxury apparently that the convent provided.
Eleanor thanked her, and the woman stood with her hands on her hips, surveying them. She frowned, but only because she was thinking hard how she could somehow propitiate these strange beings, so well provided, as it seemed, with superfluous lire.
'Ah!' she cried suddenly; 'but the ladies have not seen our bella vista!—our loggia! Santa Madonna! but I have lost my senses! Signorina! venga—venga lei.'
And beckoning to Lucy she pulled open a door that had remained unnoticed in the corner of the room.
Lucy and Eleanor followed.
Even Eleanor joined her cry of delight to Lucy's.
'Ecco!' said the massaja proudly, as though the whole landscape were her chattel,—'Monte Amiata! Selvapendente—the Paglia—does the Signora see the bridge down there?—veda lei, under Selvapendente? Those forests on the mountain there—they belong all to the Casa Guerrini—tutto, tutto! as far as the Signorina can see! And that little house there, on the hill—that casa di caccia—that was poor Don Emilio's, that was killed in the war.'
And she chattered on, in a patois not always intelligible, even to Eleanor's trained ear, about the widowed Contessa, her daughter, and her son; about the new roads that Don Emilio had made through the woods; of the repairs and rebuilding at the Villa Guerrini—all stopped since his death; of the Sindaco of Selvapendente, who often came up to Torre Amiata for the summer; of the nuns in the new convent just built there under the hill, and their fattore,—whose son was with Don Emilio after he was wounded, when the poor young man implored his own men to shoot him and put him out of his pain—who had stayed with him till he died, and had brought his watch and pocket-book back to the Contessa—