Lucrezia reddened. She feared she had perhaps said something that seemed
disrespectful.

"Oh, signora, there is not another like the padrone. Every one says so.
Ask Gaspare and Sebastiano. I only meant that--"

"I know. Well, to-day you will understand that all men are not forgetful,
when you eat your fish."

Lucrezia still looked very doubtful, but she said nothing more.

"There they are!" exclaimed Hermione.

She waved her hand and cried out. Life suddenly seemed quite different to
her. These moving figures peopled gloriously the desert waste, these
ringing voices filled with music the brooding silence of it. She murmured
to herself a verse of scripture, "Sorrow may endure for a night, but joy
cometh with the morning," and she realized for the first time how
absurdly sad and deserted she had been feeling, how unreasonably forlorn.
By her present joy she measured her past--not sorrow exactly; she could
not call it that--her past dreariness, and she said to herself with a
little shock almost of fear, "How terribly dependent I am!"

"Mamma mia!" cried Lucrezia, as another shout of laughter came up from
the ravine, "how merry and mad they are! They have had a good night's
fishing."

Hermione heard the laughter, but now it sounded a little harsh in her
ears.

"I wonder," she thought, as she leaned upon the terrace wall--"I wonder
if he has missed me at all? I wonder if men ever miss us as we miss
them?"