Night was falling over the fair. The blue dress and the ear-rings had been chosen and paid for. The promenade of the beauties in the famous inherited brocades had taken place with éclat before the church of Sant' Onofrio. Salvatore had acquired a donkey of strange beauty and wondrous strength, and Gaspare had reappeared in the piazza accompanied by Amedeo, both laden with purchases and shining with excitement and happiness. Gaspare's pockets were bulging, and he walked carefully, carrying in his hands a tortured-looking parcel.
"Dov'è il mio padrone?" he asked, as he and Amedeo pushed through the dense throng. "Dov'è il mio padrone?"
He spied Maurice and Maddalena sitting before the ristorante listening to the performance of a small Neapolitan boy with a cropped head, who was singing street songs in a powerful bass voice, and occasionally doing a few steps of a melancholy dance upon the pavement. The crowd billowed round them. A little way off the "Musica della città," surrounded by a circle of colored lamps, was playing a selection from the "Puritani." The strange ecclesiastical chant of the Roman ice venders rose up against the music as if in protest. And these three definite and fighting melodies—of the Neapolitan, the band, and the ice venders—detached themselves from a foundation of ceaseless sound, contributed by the hundreds of Sicilians who swarmed about the ancient church, infested the narrow side streets of the village, looked down from the small balconies and the windows of the houses, and gathered in mobs in the wine-shops and the trattorie.
"Signorino! Signorino! Look!"
Gaspare had reached Maurice, and now stood by the little table at which his padrone and Maddalena were sitting, and placed the tortured parcel tenderly upon it.
"Is that the clock?"
Gaspare did not reply in words, but his brown fingers deftly removed the string and paper and undressed his treasure.
"Ecco!" he exclaimed.
The clock was revealed, a great circle of blue and white standing upon short, brass legs, and ticking loudly,