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 flush which is as bright and deep a rose as any oleander-flower, she said her Latin prayer at daybreak beside the coffin of Joconda, as she had been used to do by her side, tended the mule and the dog, baked her rude loaves, and swept over and burnished her stone chambers and her bronze utensils with those northern habits of cleanliness and order in which the woman of Savoy had reared her.

Then she was free to roam all the day long, and go out upon the sea as she might choose; every day she dipped and dived and swam like any gannet. She bathed twice daily, either in fresh water or salt water, with as much zest as her winged comrades; and she kept her thick hair, that clustered like the bronze curls of a Greek bust, and all her simple apparel clean and in order, obeying all that dead Joconda had enjoined on her as her daily habits, with as implicit an obedience as ever on that soil the Etruscans had shown to the commands of Tages.

That was her fashion of repentance for many a moment of petulance, and many an hour of wilful indifference, which were to her memory as the sting of the spine of the yucca is to the flesh.