Page:In Maremma, by Ouida (vol 1).djvu/177

 Meanwhile Andreino, who was a shrewd and sagacious person, had other schemes for her future; he liked the child, and he liked still better the thought of the good store of gold and silver pieces that rumour assigned to the woman of Savoy. He had a ricketty, ague-shaking little great-grandson of eighteen, with a pretty, sickly face, who lived with his father at a wineshop in a little seatown in Apulia. ' Why not get the girl for the lad,' he thought.

'And they could live with me,' mused this disinterested old man; 'and she is stronger than many a boy, and loves steering and rowing, and would go out to the night-fishing like any man among them. It would be but kind to speak of it to Joconda.'

So he went and spoke of it with his pipe in his mouth one day that Joconda was sitting in the shade of her house wall mending a sail, for she was never idle. Joconda gave him few words in answer.

'One does not mate a trailing weed with a young oak,' she said with calm contempt, having well in her mind's eye Andreino's sickly and shaking descendant; and though he talked his best for the chief part of two