But the consummate moment was when one could raise one’s hand and watch the free bird fly. For an instant the swallow’s cold, bewildered claws clung to the palm, scratching deep into the flesh. Then it was gone over the lake. Then it was no more than a swooping black speck among the others yonder.

As each took flight, Joanna’s heart went with it. Had not she too been snared? Snared indeed by her own desire; but still more, by her own desire set free. And each bird as it went from her, was as a thank-offering for freedom.

One bird she kept to the last. It was different from the others. Much larger. A heavy breasted grey bird, rather like a sea-gull, but with a finer beak, dead straight, and pointed as a rapier. It had lain in her hands, more passive than the swallows, as if dazed. And before she let it fly, she kissed it deep among its breast feathers. Might it perhaps be her messenger, and fly from her to Mario?

Anyhow her kiss was an unspoken message, breathing remorse, asking forgiveness, proclaiming triumph.

X

“No baby coming?” asked Aunt Perdy, her eyes running over her niece’s figure as they took off their coats indoors.

Joanna shook her head.

“Ah, well, perhaps it is better so; though this visit to auntie in her lonely nest would have been something to tell a child in the years to come, wouldn’t it? Your mother will be disappointed, I dare say. Juley was always mad about babies. But you will marry again, Joanna, and give her grandchildren, I can see that. Trust Aunt Perdy’s eyes. Now come up the ladder, and you can take off your hat in the bedroom. Let me go first to show you. Bring your coat with you, and anything else. I leave nothing about downstairs. Then we can talk till Aurora has the supper ready. Aurora!” she called loudly, “Aurora! Aurora! Verdi!”

Running feet sounded from the garden, and a big, handsome contadina of about eighteen, dashed into the cottage, smiling all over her face.

Aunt Perdy, as she had done with Tommaso, presented her niece grandiloquently for the servant’s ready admiration. Then, instead of going upstairs, she went out to superintend the picking of the vegetables, and Joanna heard her giving her orders for supper in a torrent of Italian.

They had reached Aunt Perdy’s remote dwelling after a hot forty minutes’ climb, by a footpath so narrow that the three had to walk Indian file, Tommaso leading, with Joanna’s luggage on his shoulder. The place was no more than a cottage, and that of the humblest kind. But it had been built on a shelf of the hill; and standing at the door with Aunt Perdy’s carefully tended vegetable patches on either hand, one grandly overlooked the whole province. Below lay the great plain like a cloak of many colours flung there outspread from the mountains to the sea. On the right the Apennines were its collar, sweeping in a rich curve upwards to the jewels and point-lace of the Carraras. On the left its embroidered fringes were laved by the Mediterranean from Bocca d’Arno all the way round the deeply indented coast-line to the long foreland of Spezia.