were afraid the dog might hear the compliment and grow too vain.

For Ercole was a reticent man, and though he told Nino what he thought
about people, he never told any one else. Marcello was the only person
to whom he ever showed any inclination to attach himself. He regarded
even the Contessa with suspicion, perhaps merely because she was a
woman; and as for Aurora, girls did not count at all in his cosmogony.

"God made all the other animals before making women," he observed
contemptuously one day, when he had gone out alone with Marcello.

"I like them," laughed the boy.

"So did Adam," retorted Ercole, "and you see what came of it."

No answer to this argument occurred to Marcello just then, so he said
nothing; and he thought of Aurora, and his mother, and the sad-eyed
Contessa, and wondered vaguely whether they were very unlike other
women, as Ercole implied.

"When you know women," the man vouchsafed to add presently, "you will
wish you were dead. The Lord sent them into the world for an affliction
and for the punishment of our sins."

"You were never married, were you?" asked Marcello, still smiling.

Ercole stopped short in the sand, amongst the sea-thistles that grew
there, and Nino trotted up and looked at him, to be ready if anything
happened. Marcello knew the man's queer ways, and waited for him to
speak.