Read "Annunciata" by Hjalmar Hjorth Boysen online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
It was the afternoon of Christmas-day, six weeks after Cranbrook's arrival at the villa. The air was soft and balmy and the blooming rose-bushes under the windows sent up from time to time delicious whiffs of fragrance. The sky was strangely clear, and long, cool vistas opened to the sight among the cloud-banks that hung over the tops of the Alban Mountains. Cranbrook was sitting out on the _loggia_ reading the scene in the Odyssey where the shipwrecked Ulysses steps out from the copse where he has been sleeping and interrupts the ball-play of Nausicaa and her maidens. How pure and sweet the air that breathed from these pages! What a noble and dignified maiden was this Nausicaa! At this moment the merry voice of Annunciata was heard in the garden below. The young man let his book drop and leaned out over the wall. There she stood, tall and stately, receiving, with the manner of a good-natured empress, a white-haired priest who came waddling briskly toward her.
"_Bona festa_, Padre Gregorio," she cried, seizing the old man's hand. "Mother is going to have macaroni for supper and she was just going to send Pietro after you. For you know you promised to be with us this blessed day."