bench beside the door of strangers as though she were in some safe
and happy home.

Clelia Alba looked down on her a few moments, then took the kerchief
off her hair, and laid it gently, without awakening the sleeper, over
the breast and the face of the child, on which flies were settling
and the sun was shining.

Then she picked up the empty earthenware bowl, and went indoors
again.

"I will go back to the river," said Adone. "I have left the net
there."

His mother nodded assent.

"You will not send this little foreigner away till I return?" he
asked. Every one was a foreigner who had not been born in the vale of
Edera.

"No; not till you return."

He went away through the sunshine and shadow of the olive-trees. He
knew that his mother never broke her word. But she thought as she
washed the bowl: "A little stray mongrel bitch like that may bite
badly some day. She must go. She is nothing now; but by and by she
may bite."

Clelia Alba knew human nature, though she had never been out of sight
of the river Edera. She took her spinning-wheel and sat down by the