'Write me a long letter and a good one, and word for word as I tell it you; and write it so that it can go over the sea and the hills without harm; and when it is written address it clearly and in a bold hand to Anton and Joachim Sanctis, above the Val de Cogne, in the kingdom of Savoy.'
As she dictated so the scrivener wrote, and with her own hand Joconda dropped the letter into the bag of the post, as it went out of Grosseto that evening time at sunset.
Anton and Joachim, if alive, would be very old men, for they had been older than she by some years, but that scarcely occurred to her. She always saw them as she had seen them last, bold mountaineers and farmers, stalwart and handsome, angry at her wedding with the Italian from over the seas, and bidding her and him a reluctant and sullen God-speed as the mules jolted down the steep ways into the valley, and the glaciers of Grandcou and Monei and the peak of the beautiful Grivola were lost for ever to her sight.
'Ay, I had better have stayed there,' she thought, with a wistful sigh, as she dropped her letter in the post and made
