to say. But like enough, like enough; they are always ready to go
before the priest in those high hills."

The little girl glided into her place humbly and naturally, with no
servility but with untiring willingness and thankfulness. It seemed
to her an amazing favour of heaven to live with these good people; to
have a roof over her head and food regularly every day. Up there in
her home, amongst the crags of Ansalda, she had never known what it
was not to have a daily hunger gnawing always in her entrails, and
making her writhe at night on her bed of dry leaves. In her thirteen
years of life she had never once had enough--no one ever had. A full
stomach had been a thing unknown.

She began to grow, she began to put a little flesh on her bones; they
had cut her hair short, for it had been so rough, and it grew again
burnished and bright like copper; colour came into her cheeks and
lips; she seemed to spring upward, visibly, like a young cane. She
worked hard, but she worked willingly, and she was well nourished on
sound food, though it had little variety and was entirely vegetable;
and every day she went down and bathed in the river at the same place
where she had sat nude under the dock leaves whilst her skirt dried
in the sun.

To her the Terra Vergine was Paradise itself; to be fed, to be
clothed, to have a mattress to sleep on, to work amongst the flowers
and the grass and the animals--it was all so beautiful, she thought
sometimes that she must be in heaven.

She spoke little. Since she had been under this roof she had grown
ashamed of the squalor and starvation and wretchedness of her past