Jenny gave a polite little laugh, and Francesca smiled faintly.
At this moment a bare-headed, dark-haired woman with a bold, yellow, greasy face entered the room with a mandolin. She was accompanied by a small man in the threadbare finery of a waiter, and carrying a guitar.
“I was right, you see, Cesca,” said Jenny, speaking as to a child. “There is Emilia; now we are going to have some music.”
“That’s jolly,” said Helge. “Do the ballad singers really still go about here in Rome singing in the taverns?”
The singers tuned up “The Merry Widow.” The woman had a high, clear, metallic voice.
“Oh, how horrid,” cried Francesca, awakening; “we don’t want that, we want something Italian—la luna con palido canto, or what do you think?”
She went up to the singers and greeted them like old friends—laughed and gesticulated, seizing the guitar, and played, humming a few bars of one or two songs.
The Italian woman sang. The melody floated sweet and insinuating to the accompaniment of twanging metal strings, and Helge’s four new friends joined in the refrain. It was about amore and bacciare.
“It is a love song, is it not?”