stray about homeless and hungry, and end in some bottomless pit. The
child might be the devil's spawn. No one could be sure. But she had
eyes which looked up straight and true, and were as clear as the
river water where it flowed over pebbles in the shade. When the devil
is in a soul he always grins behind the eyes; he cannot help it; and
so you know him; thus, at least, they thought at Ruscino and in all
the vale of Edera; and the devil did not lurk in the eyes of Nerina.

"Have I done right, reverend sir?" asked Clelia Alba of the Vicar of
Ruscino.

"Oh, yes--yes--charity is always right," he answered, unwilling to
discourage her in her benevolence; but in his own mind he thought,
"The child is a child, but she will grow; she is brown, and starved,
and ugly now, but she will grow; she is a female thing and she will
grow, and I think she will be handsome later on; it would have been
more prudent to have put some money in her hand and some linen in her
wallet, and have let her pass on her way down the river. The saints
forbid that I should put aloes into the honey of their hearts; but
this child will grow."

Clelia Alba perceived that he had his doubts as she had hers. But
they said nothing of them to each other. The issue would lie with
Time, whom men always depict as a mower, but who is also a sower,
too. However, for good or ill, she was there; and he knew that,
having once harboured her, they would never drive her adrift. Clelia
Alba was in every sense a good woman; a little hard at times, narrow
of sympathy, too much shut up in her maternal passion; but in the
main merciful and correct in judgment.