evacuate before to-morrow."

The old woman received the news without comment, but a look of despair
came into her usually bright eyes, and for the moment made them tragic.
Long years before, when Austria had crossed the mountains and entered
Cellino, she had been a young girl. Now in her old age they were to
come again, and there was no reason to hope that this time they would
be less brutal in their triumph than they had been formerly. The
memory of their brutality was still a vivid one.

"We will leave at once," she said at last, and her decision was so
unexpected, that Lucia gasped in surprise.

"Leave? But, Nana, where will we go? What will become of our things?"
she exclaimed. "Surely we had better wait at least until we are
ordered out."

"No, we will leave at once," Nana replied firmly. "The order may come
too late, as it did before. What do those boys who swagger about in
men's places know about the enemy? There is not one that can remember
them. But I, old Nana, have known them and their ways, and I say we
must go at once."

Lucia looked at the new light of determination in her grandmother's
eyes, and realized with a shock of surprise that to protest would be
useless.

"Where is Beppi?" she asked. "I will go and find him."

"With the goats," Nana replied. "Call him, I will go in and start