There is nobody like you, Folco.

You are an elder brother to me, and yet you don't preach.

I often tell my mother so." This was true, and what Marcello told her added to her happiness, if anything could do that, and she encouraged the two to go off together as much as possible.

She even suggested that they should go down to San Domenico for a fortnight, to look after the great Calabrian estate.
They rose and began to walk toward the cottage.

The shooting had been good that morning, as quail-shooting goes, and the man who acted as keeper, loader, gardener, and general factotum, and who went out with any one who wanted to shoot, had gone on to the cottage with the bag, the two guns, and the animal which he called his dog.