Part 13

"And why not?" cried the other, with a snort. "You have examples enough about you, my conscience! What is all their singing and stuff about?"

"I think it is about me, Nannina."

"And their disputing?"

"It is about me."

"And the rhymes?"

"They are about me."

"And you have never--?"

"Never, never, never!"

"What, not in the garden even?"

"No, never, I tell you. Only my hand."

"Your hand--pouf! The nightingales sing there, I suppose."

"All night."

"And there is moonlight?"

"Floods of moonlight."

"Dio! Dio santissimo!" cried Nannina, striking her friend on the knee, "you must be out of this, Ippolita! This is unwholesome: I like not the smell of this. Faugh, fungus! Mawkish! I will see your father this very night."

Ippolita shook her head again. "My father is paid by these signori."

"Then the priest must do it. Father Corrado must do it."

"He dare not."

"A convent--?"

"No, never! That is worse than this. But--oh, Nannina! if I dared I would do such a thing."

"Well, let me hear. If it can be done it shall be done."

"Ah," sighed Ippolita, with a hand on her heart, "ah, but it cannot be done!"

"Then why speak of it?"

"Because I want so much to do it. Listen."

Then Ippolita, clinging to her friend's neck, whispered her darling thought. The goatherds on the hills! There was freedom--clean, untrammelled freedom! No philandering, for no one would know she was a girl; no ceremony, no grimacing, no stiff clothes; no hair-tiring--she must cut off her hair--no bathing, ah, Heaven! If she might go for a few months, a few weeks, until the hue and cry was over, until the signori had thought of a new game; then she would come back, and her father would be so glad of her that he would not beat her more than she could fairly stand. It was a great scheme; indeed it was the only way. But how to do? How to do?

"I suppose it is a dream of mine," sighed she, knotting her fingers in and out of the gold chains.

Annina said nothing, but frowned a good deal. "I see that you are not safe in Padua," she said in the end. "You are really too handsome, my child. You couldn't show your nose without being known and reported. You must go outside if you are to be in peace."

"But I can't go, Nannina; you know it as well as I do."