There could be no doubt but that the sick boy had eaten the beans; and beans, especially white ones, are not good for people who have the fever, as Nanna had justly observed.
"On Sunday he shall have a dish of liver and cabbage," she said, in a cheerful tone.

"There is much strength in liver, and cabbage is good for the blood.

I shall take it to him myself, for it will be a pleasure to see him eat." "The beans were soon finished," said Regina, with perfect truth.
"I told you how it would be," Paoluccio answered.
But Regina knew that the time had come to get Marcello away from the inn if he ever was to leave it alive, and in the afternoon, when Nanna was dozing in her chair in the kitchen and Paoluccio was snoring upstairs, and when she had smoothed Marcello's pillow, she went out and sat down in front of the house, where there was shade at that hour, though the glare from the dusty road would have blinded weaker eyes than hers.

She sat on the stone seat that ran along the house, and leaned against the rough wall, thinking and scheming, and quite sure that she should find a way.
At first she looked about, while she thought, from the well-known mountains that bounded her world to the familiar arches of the distant aqueduct, from the dry ditch opposite to the burning sky above and the greyish green hillocks below Tivoli.

But by and by she looked straight before her, with a steady, concentrated stare, as if she saw something happening and was watching to see how it would end.
She had found what she wanted, and was quite sure of it; only a few details remained to be settled, such as what was to become of her after she left the inn where she had grown up.