Page:In Maremma, by Ouida (vol 1).djvu/51

 nigh fifty years, but she was 'the woman of Savoy' to them all.

It had been a fatal day for her when her mother's sister, a farmer's wife near S. Martin Lantosque, had lost her cows one by one by disease, and sent to beg that her niece, who was so skilled in dairy matters, would go and spend a summer with her; and in the course of that summer, up at Lantosque, to visit mountain neighbours, there had come some seafaring men from Villafranca, away on the seaboard, and amongst them had been a man of Maremma, Sostegno Romanelli, the owner of a tartana then lying off the shores of Savoy. He had been a handsome young man, and at that time well-to-do as a coaster; he had persuaded the blue-eyed maiden from the green alps above the Val de Cogne to give a favourable answer to his wooing. She and he had been wedded that same summer at the little church of S. Martin, and she had gone to live with him at his native Maremmana town.

Things had done very well with them awhile; then turned and went as ill. The tartana had to be sold, and its owner had to become a deep-water fisherman, working for the gain of others. His wife, ashamed of