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 not avenge an insult. Though these tombs had been heaped with gold, the child of Saturnino would have touched none of it.

Having nothing else of her own, she gave Este the uttermost of her strength and patience; she laboured late and early, she hunted for edible fungi, she netted fish—a cruelty she loathed—she worked hard at the rush-plaiting and the spinning to have something to take in to Telamone or Orbetello with which to purchase the wine he needed. She raked up the pine-cones, she cut the ling and broom; she carried in the dry wood she collected from under the trees; she kept the sepulchres as clean and sweet as any sea-shell with the cleanly ways that Joconda had made a second nature to her in her childhood. She worked arduously and willingly in all ways, and this very devotion to him obscured her beauty to him; sometimes he was ingrate enough to murmur angrily because she left him so much alone.

She was only his servant to him; he did not see his ministering angel in her. He did not see that glory as of a young goddess which was about her buoyant feet and her close-curled head for the eyes of Maurice Sanctis and of the Sicilian mariner,