'There's some money for the Relief Committee,' she said, as she tossed the slip of paper across the table toward him. 'That's all I have in the bank just at present, but I will give some more as soon as I get it.'
Sybert's face was equally impassive as he glanced from the paper back to her.
'Thirteen thousand lire is a good deal. Do you think you ought----'
'I do as I please with my own money--this _is_ my own,' she added in parenthesis. 'My mother left it to me.'
'As you please,' he returned, pocketing the slip with a half-shrug. 'I know a village in Calabria that will be very grateful for a little help until the olives ripen again.'
'Dinner is served,' announced Pietro in the doorway.
'I don't want any dinner to-night,' and she turned upstairs to her room. She sat for half an hour staring out at the darkening Campagna; then she rose and lighted the candles, and commenced a letter to her father. Her pen she dipped in blood. She told him everything she had heard or seen or imagined about Italy--of the 'hunger madness' in the north and the starving peasants in the south; of the poor people of Castel Vivalanti and little Gervasio. She told him what the people said about her uncle; that they called her the 'Wheat Princess'; and that the children in the streets taunted her as she went past. She told him that the name of Copley was despised from end to end of Italy. All the crimes that have ever been laid at the door of the government and the church and the ignorance of the people, Marcia heaped upon her offending father's shoulders, but with the forgiving assurance that she knew he didn't mean it. And would he please prove that he didn't mean it, by stopping the corner immediately and sending wheat to Italy? It was a letter to wring a father's heart--and a financier's.
FOR the next week or so Marcia steadfastly avoided meeting people. There were no visitors at the villa, and it was easy to find pretexts for not going into Rome. She felt an overwhelming reluctance to meeting any of her friends--to meeting any one, in truth, who even knew her name. It seemed to her that beneath their smiles and pleasant speeches she could read their thoughts; that the words 'wheat, wheat, wheat' rang as an undertone to every sentence that was spoken. Her horseback rides were ridden in the direction away from Castel Vivalanti, and if, by chance, she did meet any of her former friends the villagers, she galloped past, looking the other way.