Squire's awkward sons. Mrs. Avory had only brief glimpses of Valeria and Edith darting indoors and out again; running up to their rooms to change their skirts; calling through the house for their racquets. Zio Giacomo walked about the garden, giving advice to Fräulein about the cultivation of tomatoes, and wondering why English people never ate macaroni.

"Nor Knodel," said Fräulein.

"Nor risotto," said Zio Giacomo.

"Nor Leberwurst," said Fräulein.

"Nor cappelletti al sugo," said Zio Giacomo.

"It is so as with the etucation," said Fräulein. "The etucation is again already quite wrong; not only the eating and the cooking of the foot...." And so they rambled along. And Zio Giacomo was homesick.

Suddenly Valeria was homesick too. It began on the first day of the tennis tournament—a resplendent light-blue day. Nino said that the sky matched Edith's dress and also her eyes, which reminded him of Lake Como. Their partnership was very successful; Edith, airy and swift, darted and flashed across the court, playing almost impossible balls. In the evening, as she lay back in the rocking-chair, pale and sweet, with her shimmering hair about her, Nino called her a tired butterfly, and sang "La Farfalla" to her. Valeria was miserable. She said it was homesickness. She felt that she was homesick for the sun of Italy and the language of Italy; homesick for people with loud voices and easy gesticulations and excitable temperaments; homesick for people with dark eyes and dark hair.

On the second day of the tournament, at tea on the Vicar's lawn, she became still more homesick. Her partner was offering her cress-sandwiches, and telling her that it was very warm for April, and that last year in April it had been much colder. Meanwhile, she could see Nino at the other side of the lawn tuning a guitar that had been brought to him; he was laughing and playing chords on it with his teaspoon. Edith and two other girls stood near him; their three fair heads shone in the sunlight. Suddenly Valeria felt as if she could not breathe in England any more. She said to herself that it must be the well-bred voices, the conversation about the weather, the trimness, the tidiness, the tea, the tennis, that were insufferable to her chagrined heart. Meanwhile her dark eyes rested upon Nino and upon the three blonde heads, inclined towards him, and glistening in different sheens of gold. She felt hot tears pricking her eyes.

That evening in her room, as they were preparing for bed, Edith talked to her sister-in-law through the open door. "What fun everything is, Val, isn't it?" she said, shaking out her light locks, and brushing them until they crackled and flew, and stood out like pale fire round her face. "Life is a delightful institution!"

As no answer came from Valeria's room, Edith looked in. Valeria was lying on her bed, still in her pink evening dress, with her face hidden in the pillow.

"Why? What has happened, dear?" asked Edith, bending over the dark bowed head.

"Oh, I hate everything!" murmured Valeria. "That horrid tennis, and those horrid girls, always laughing, always laughing, always laughing."

Edith sat down beside her. "But we laughed, too—at least, I know I did! And as for Nino, he laughed all the time."

"That is it," cried Valeria, sitting up, tearful and indignant. "In Italy Nino never laughed. In Italy we do not laugh for nothing, just to show our teeth and pretend we are vivacious."

Edith was astonished. She sat for a long while looking at Valeria's disconsolate figure, and thinking matters over. Quite suddenly she bent down and kissed Valeria, and said: "Don't cry." So Valeria, who had left off crying, began to cry again. And still more she cried when she raised her head and saw Edith's shower of scintillant hair, and the two little Lakes of Como brimming over with limpid tears. They kissed each other, and called themselves silly and goose-like; and then they laughed and kissed each other again, and went to bed.

Valeria fell asleep.

But Edith lay thinking in the dark.

She got up quite early, and took little Nancy primrosing in the woods; so Nino and Valeria went to the tennis tournament alone. A fat, torpid girl took Edith's place, and Valeria laughed all the morning.

Edith and Nancy came in from the woods late for luncheon. When they appeared, Nino looked up at Edith in surprise. Mrs. Avory said: "Edith, my dear, what have you done? You look a sight!"

"Do I?" said Edith. "Why, this is the famous North-German coiffure Fräulein has made me."

Valeria's face had flushed. "You ought not to have let her drag your hair back so tight," she said. And Mrs. Avory added: "I thought you had given that ugly brown dress away long ago."

Then Nancy spoke of the primroses and Nino of the tennis; and Edith kept and adopted the North-German coiffure. She dropped out of the tournament because it gave her a pain in her shoulders, and she went for long walks with Nancy.

Nancy was good company. Edith grew to look for ward to the walks and to the warm clasp of Nancy's little hand in hers, and the sound of Nancy's treble voice beside her. Nancy asked few questions. She preferred not to know what things were. She had never liked fireworks after she had seen them in the day-time packed in a box. What! they were not baby stars? All Fräulein's definitions of things and of phenomena were painful to her mind as to her ear. But the seventeen years of Edith and the eight springtimes of the child kept step harmoniously. Nancy's dawning spirit, urged by a presaging flame, pressed forward to its morning; while Edith's early day, chilled by an unseen blight, turned back, and stopped before its noon. Her springtide faded before its flowering.

Thus the two girl-souls met, and their love bloomed upwards in concord like two flames.

On Easter Sunday Fräulein entered late for luncheon, and Nancy did not come at all. Fräulein apologized for her: "Nancy is in the summer-house writing a poetry. She says she will not have any lunch."

Mrs. Avory laughed, and Nino said: "What is the poetry about?"

"I think," replied Fräulein, shaking out her table-napkin, and tucking it carefully into her collar, "it is about her broken doll and her dead canary."

"Is the canary dead?" exclaimed Valeria. "Why did you not tell me?"

"She shall have a new doll," said Mrs. Avory, "at once."

"But it isn't—she hasn't—they are not!" explained Fräulein, much confused. "Only she says she cannot write a poetry about things that are not broken and dead."

The old grandfather, who now rarely spoke, raised his head, and said mournfully, "Broken and dead—broken and dead," and went on repeating the words all through lunch, until he was coaxed and scolded into silence.

There was much excitement over Nancy's poem that afternoon. It was read aloud by Edith, and then by Valeria, and then by Fräulein, and then again by Edith. Valeria improvised a translation of it into Italian for Zio Giacomo and Nino; and then it was read aloud once more by Edith. Everybody laughed and wept; and then Valeria kissed everybody. Nancy was a genius! They had always known it. Zio Giacomo said that it was in his brother's family; whereupon Mrs. Avory said, "Indeed?" and raised her eyebrows and felt hurt. But how—said Valeria—had it come into Nancy's head to write a poem? And what if she were never to be able to write another? Such things had happened. Could she try again and write something else? Just now! Oh, anything!... Saying how she wrote this poem, for instance!

So little Nancy, all flushed and wild and charming, extemporized in Fräulein's note-book: