by the glass doors on the left, into the domestic courtyard.

It was lower than the gardens round it, and the sunshine came through
the trellised arches on to the flagstones, where the grass grew fine and
green in the cracks, and all was deserted and spacious and still. There
were one or two orange-tubs in the light.

Then I heard a noise, and there in the corner, among all the pink
geraniums and the sunshine, the Signora Gemma sat laughing with a baby.
It was a fair, bonny thing of eighteen months. The Signora was
concentrated upon the child as he sat, stolid and handsome, in his
little white cap, perched on a bench picking at the pink geraniums.

She laughed, bent forward her dark face out of the shadow, swift into a
glitter of sunshine near the sunny baby, laughing again excitedly,
making mother-noises. The child took no notice of her. She caught him
swiftly into the shadow, and they were obscured; her dark head was
against the baby's wool jacket, she was kissing his neck, avidly, under
the creeper leaves. The pink geraniums still frilled joyously in
the sunshine.

I had forgotten the padrone. Suddenly I turned to him inquiringly.

'The Signora's nephew,' he explained, briefly, curtly, in a small voice.
It was as if he were ashamed, or too deeply chagrined.

The woman had seen us watching, so she came across the sunshine with the
child, laughing, talking to the baby, not coming out of her own world to
us, not acknowledging us, except formally.