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-- 'Is the Contessa here ?' said Eleanor, looking at the woman with the strained and startled air that was becoming habitual to her, as though each morsel of passing news only served somehow to make life's burden heavier.
But certainly the Contessa was here! She and Donna Teresa were always at the Villa.

Once they used to go to Rome and Florence part of the year, but now--no more! A sudden uproar arose from below--of crying children and barking dogs.

The woman threw up her hands.

'What are they doing to me with the baby ?' she cried, and disappeared.
Lucy went back to fetch the carpet-chair.

She caught up also a couple of Florentine silk blankets that were among their wraps.