“The way to Dartmouth will not now seem so long,” she said, and Bindo nodded his head with a mouth quite full of good brown bread and fat bacon.
“How much do they love carne secca here!” said Nonno, with a sigh, thinking of the long coils of macaroni, the lovely little fried fish, the oil, the garlic, the black beans, that he never saw now, alas, alas! “The land is fat, but the people they know not how to live,” he added, with a sigh. “A people without wine,—what should they know?”
“They make good bread,” said Gemma, with her ivory teeth in a crust.
Meantime, the person who owned the lane was coming out into the fields to see how his men got on with their work. His house stood near, hidden in trees on a bend of the Exe. He was rich, young, prosperous, and handsome; he was also generous and charitable; but he was a magistrate, and he hated strollers. By name he was known as Philip Carey; his people had been squires here for many generations; he called himself a yeoman, and was as proud as if he were a prince.
As fates would have it, he rode down the lane now on his gray horse, and when he saw the group of Nonno and Gemma and Bindo, with their bags and bales and bundles, scattered about on the turf of his lane, his gray eyes grew ominously dark.
“Who gave you leave to come here?” he asked, sternly enough, as he reined up his horse.
Nonno looked up smiling, and stood up and bowed with grace and ease. The English tongue he had never been able to master: he glanced at Gemma to bid her answer.
“We were only resting, Excellenza,” said she, boldly. “It is a public road.”
“It is not a public road,” said the owner of it. “And if it were, you would have no right to cumber it. Are you strollers?”
“Strollers?” repeated Gemma: she did not understand the word.