On the other side of the hedge, to their right, there was a large corn-field; it was now the time when wheat is ripe in England, and the men and women who were reaping it were sitting, resting, drinking their cider and eating their noonday bread and bacon. Bindo watched them through a hole in the hedge, and began to cry.
“It makes me hungrier to see them eat!” he said, with a sob. Gemma sprang to her feet.
“Do not cry so, my Bindo,” she said, with a tender voice: “I will ask them to give you some.”
She thrust her lithe body through the gap, and walked boldly across the field,—a strange figure for an English corn-field, with her short white skirt, and her red bodice, and her striped sash of many colors, and her little coral ear-rings in her ears; she was bareheaded, and her dusky gold hair, the hair that the old painters loved, was coiled rope-like all around her small head.
“My little brother is hungry: will you be so very gentle and give us a little bread?” she said, in her pretty accent, which robbed the English tongue of all its gutturals and clothed it in a sweetness not its own. She was not fond of begging, being proud, and she colored very much as she said it.
The reapers stared, then grinned, gaped once or twice, and then stretched big brown hands out to her with goodly portions of food, and one added a mug of cider.
“I do thank you so much,” she said, with a smile that was like a sunbeam. “The drink I take not, for Nonno has no love of it; but for the bread I pray may San Martino bless you!”
Then she courtesied to them, as nature and nobody else had taught her to do, and ran away, fleet as a lapwing, with her treasure.
“’Tis that dancing-girl of the Popish country,” said the men one to another, and added that if the master caught her in his lane ’twould be the worse for her, for he couldna abide tramps and vagabon’s. But Gemma, who knew nothing of that, was sharing her spoils with glee, and breaking the small bit of bread she allowed to herself with teeth as white as a dog’s.