awe and in reverence as a deity, as the Greeks of old held their
streams. It would have drowned the child, he thought, if she had been
an evil creature or of evil augury. But he did not say so, for he did
not care to provoke Don Silverio's fine fleeting ironical smile.

A goatherd who passed some few days later with his flock on his way
to the mountains recognised the little girl.

"You are Black Fausto's daughter," he said to her. "Is he dead? Eh,
well, we must all die. May his soul rest."

To Gianna, who questioned him, he said, "Yes, he was a good soul.
Often have I seen him down in the Roman plains. He worked himself to
death. These gangs of labourers get poor pay. I saw him also in the
hills where this girl comes from, ever so high up, you seem to touch
the sky. I summered there two years ago; he had his womankind in a
cabin, and he took all that he got home to them. Aye, he was a good
soul. We can come away out of the heats, but they have to stay down
in them; for the reaping and the sowing are their chief gain, and
they get the fever into their blood, and the worms into their
bellies, and it kills them mostly before they are forty. You see, at
Ansalda, where he came from, it was snow eight months out of the
twelve, so the heats and the mists killed him: for the air you are
born in you want, and if you do not get it in time you sicken."

"Like enough," said Gianna, who herself had never been out of sight
of the river Edera ever since she had been a babe in swaddling
clothes. "Tell me, gossip, was the child born in wedlock?"

"Eh, eh!" said the goatherd grinning. "That I would not take on me