Marrina quickly swings herself down the broken steps of her abode, and hastens towards the advancing couple.
‘Fetch a chair for her under the _pergola_; why it’s no education you young men have nowadays,’ she whispered angrily to Giannino.
The rain has come up the valley in a great mist; it has broken over the fields and the woods in a torrent that quickly saturates the ground; it drops again from the broad-leaved chestnuts. It is scarcely a wholesome rain, though the land was parched, for the hail descends and a violent storm might heavily damage the growing things of the country.
The _Prevosto_ seeks Marrina’s sympathy in this evil chance, but all her complaints have quickly given place to pleasure in the very presence of the townwoman with the real woollen dress on of a working-day. She is only a tradesman’s wife, but she has bits of news from the city and a figured silk jacket to display, and Marrina warms so that she is really mortified at the refusal of beans and _polenta_, which refreshment was offered at once with the gracious hospitality that comes as naturally to these courteous peasants as the passing benediction or chance greeting by the roadside.
But at last the storm is over, the air is fresh, the soil is fragrant after the rain. The _Prevosto_ goes on his way towards the sick person, whom he has to visit. The tradesman’s wife, after an exciting gossip, returns to the pink house in the meadows. Marrina lays aside her needle, for the night has darkened, and work cannot be done by firelight. ‘She’s a good soul, and it was a beautiful stuff,’ she murmurs sitting by the hearth. ‘But I say let everyone keep to what he’s been brought up in. And as for the strange folk and the going to America, I say, God forbid!’
For a time holidays are over. Until the festival of the Madonna is due, after the dog days, there is no rigorous necessity for laziness. San Giovanni is past, and the most particular feasts of the early summer. Work is again the order of the day, with only the less important interval of Sunday to make a little breathing space—breathing space that will scarcely seem necessary from such pleasurable labour, perhaps, for all the peasants of the Northern Apennines think it indispensable even though they cannot be so fitly accused as the Southern Italians of that love of the _dolce far niente_ which has come to be considered, sometimes most unjustly, such a good description of their existence.