the horses to be put to.

The farm hands had slunk away to one of the outhouses, and Filomena and
Jacopone stood bowing and curtseying as the carriage drew up at the
kitchen door. In a corner of the big vaulted room the little foundling
was washing the dishes, heaping the scraps in a bowl for herself and the
fowls. Odo ran back and touched her arm. She gave a start and looked at
him with frightened eyes. He had nothing to give her, but he said:
"Good-bye, Momola"; and he thought to himself that when he was grown up
and had a sword he would surely come back and bring her a pair of shoes
and a panettone. The abate was calling him, and the next moment he found
himself lifted into the carriage, amid the blessings and lamentations of
his foster-parents; and with a great baying of dogs and clacking of
whipcord the horses clattered out of the farmyard, and turned their
heads toward Pianura.

The mist had rolled back and fields and vineyards lay bare to the winter
moon. The way was lonely, for it skirted the marsh, where no one lived;
and only here and there the tall black shadow of a crucifix ate into the
whiteness of the road. Shreds of vapour still hung about the hollows,
but beyond these fold on fold of translucent hills melted into a sky
dewy with stars. Odo cowered in his corner, staring out awestruck at the
unrolling of the strange white landscape. He had seldom been out at
night, and never in a carriage; and there was something terrifying to
him in this flight through the silent moon-washed fields, where no oxen
moved in the furrows, no peasants pruned the mulberries, and not a
goat's bell tinkled among the oaks. He felt himself alone in a ghostly
world from which even the animals had vanished, and at last he averted
his eyes from the dreadful scene and sat watching the abate, who had
fixed a reading-lamp at his back, and whose hooked-nosed shadow, as the