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headmaster was there watching ; usually he was rude but he was very kind that morning. They went up to their father’s room : Concettina was kneeling there sobbing, Ippolito on the other hand was standing still and silent, his face thin and white as usual. Their father was lying fully dressed on the bed, with his tie on, and shoes on his feet, and his face now was very beautiful, no longer trembling and sweaty, but composed and gentle.
    Then Signora Maria took Anna to the house opposite, for the lady there had sent over to suggest that she might be left with them for the whole day. Anna was frightened because there was a dog there. Not a dog like Ippolito’s, curly-haired and stupid, but an Alsatian tied up with a chain ; and hung on a tree in the garden was a notice : Cave canem. And she was also frightened because there was a ping-pong table. Through the hedge she had seen a boy playing ping-pong with an old gentleman. And so she was frightened that the boy might ask her to play and she didn’t know how to. She thought of saying that she knew how to play but didn’t want to because at their house at Le Visciole there was a ping-pong table and they did nothing but play at it all the summer. But if later all of a sudden she and the boy made great friends, it might perhaps be necessary to invite him to come one summer to Le Visciole and then he would realize that there wasn’t a ping-pong table there at all.
    She had never been in the house opposite. Through the hedge she had looked at the boy and the old gentleman and the dog. The lady with the fringe who appeared on the balcony in her dressing-gown, and who looked so young, was the old gentleman’s wife. Then there was a red-haired girl, who was the daughter of the old gentleman and of another wife whom he had had before. On the other hand the boy, and also another bigger boy who must be about Ippolito’s age, were the sons of this present wife, the one with the fringe. Signora Maria said they were very rich people, for the old gentleman was the owner of the soap factory, the long red-brick building on the river, with chimneys that were always smoking. They were very, very rich people. They never boiled up their coffee-grounds a second time, but gave them to certain monks who came to ask for them. The red-haired girl, daughter of the old gentleman’s other wife, came out in the evenings with a broom and swept the whole garden, muttering all the time and working herself up into a rage. Signora Maria, too, had very often looked through the hedge, for she was inquisitive and much interested in rich people.
    Signora Maria left Anna with the maid who came to open the door, recommending that they should make her put a scarf round her neck if she went out in the garden, and then she went home again. The maid led Anna to a room on the floor above and told her to wait there, and in a moment Signor Giuma would come and keep her company. Anna did not know who Signor Giuma was. From the windows she saw her own home—quite different when seen thus from this side, low, small and old, with the dried-up wistaria on the balcony and, on one corner of the roof, Giustino’s ball, torn and rain-soaked. The shutters were closed in her father’s room : and she remembered suddenly how he used to throw open the shutters with a clatter and lean out to look at the morning, soaping his chin with the shaving-brush and stretching out his thin neck, and would say to her, “Go and buy me some tobacco. Make yourself useful, seeing that you’re not ornamental.” And she seemed to see him going out into the garden, with his eyeglass, in his white flannel trousers, with his long legs that were slightly crooked because he had done so much riding as a young man. And she wondered where her father was now. She believed in hell, in purgatory and in paradise, and thought that her father must now be in purgatory, repenting of the unkind things he had so often