Page:In Maremma, by Ouida (vol 1).djvu/289

 there was a certain distance between them always because he was a little afraid of her, and she was a little suspicious of him. He had been forced to swear to her that he would tell no one how or where she dwelt, and having sworn this, he shared her confidence. One thing alone she never told him, that she had brought the coffin of Joconda there, and had laid it in an inner chamber of the painted tombs.

He was of use to her.

She cut the lake-rush and the chairmaker's-rush and wove them into rude matting and into frail baskets, and he sold these to San Lionardo folk for a few centimes. She had learned many uses of edible roots and cryptogams from Joconda, and gathered those, and he sold them also; he brought her flax and she spun it; he brought her straw and she plaited it; when his goats were on the hills and his smaller brother minded them, he had run to and fro on her errands. Busy and fond of money, which his father never let him handle, he was glad to go between moorland and mountain on these missions, and could cheat her comfortably with a childish glee that was united with a shrewd self-interest.