"Aie!" she cried with a shrill cry of alarm, like a bird who sees a
fowler. She stopped short in her progress; the water at that moment
was up to her knees. With both hands she held up her petticoat to save
it from another wetting; her little bundle was balanced on her head,
the light shone in her great brown eyes. The youth turned and saw
her.

She was a very young girl, thirteen at most; her small flat breasts
were those of a child, her narrow shoulders and her narrow loin spoke
of scanty food and privation of all kinds, and her arms and legs were
brown from the play of the sun on their nakedness; they were little
else than skin and bone, nerves and sinew, and looked like stakes of
wood. All the veins and muscles stood revealed as in anatomy, and her
face, which would have been a child's face, a nymph's face, with
level brows, a pure straight profile, and small close ears like
shells, was so fleshless and sunburnt that she looked almost like a
mummy. Her eyes had in them the surprise and sadness of those of a
weaning calf; and her hair, too abundant for such a small head,
would, had it not been so dusty and entangled, have been of a read
golden bronze, the hue of a chestnut which has just burst open its
green husk.

"Who are you?" said the young man, looking at her in surprise.

"I am Nerina," answered the child.

"Where do you come from? What is your country?"

She pointed vaguely to the south-west mountains, where the snow on
the upper ranges was still lying with bands of cloud resting on it.