Page:In Maremma, by Ouida (vol 1).djvu/298

 in winter and in summer both when you want a bowl full of soup or a handful of mushrooms.'

Then Zefferino cried.

He did not like her to fancy him selfish.

'For if she once think me so,' he thought, 'she will begin to doubt, and to count the centimes.'

But Musa did not count the centimes.

When the heat of noon came, she took the mule down into the painted chambers of the dead, and sat there herself. Zirlo came too;—a pretty little quaint figure, a childish Faunus;—and asked her for a bowl of soup. Then together they ate, using the black earthenware cups and platters that had been strewn on the floor of the tombs: cups and platters made two thousand years before, made for the banquets of the dead, and perhaps profaned by their young lips, yet innocently so.