And she was so dexterous, so sure, so silent; even the sharp eyes of old Gianna never detected her nocturnal absence, even the shrewd observation of Clelia Alba never detected any trace of fatigue in her or any negligence in her tasks.  She was always there when they needed her, did all that she was used to do, was obedient to every word or sign; they did not know that as she carried the water pails, or cut the grass, or swept the bricks, or washed the linen, her heart sung proudly within her a joyous song because she shared a secret —­ a perilous secret —­ of which the elder woman knew nothing.  Any night a stray shot might strike her as she ran over the moors, or through the heather; any night a false step might pitch her headlong into a ravine or a pool; any night, returning through the shallows of the ford, she might miss her footing and fall into one of the bottomless holes that the river hid in its depths:  but the danger of it only endeared her errand the more to her; made her the prouder that she was chosen for it.

“I fear nothing,” she said to him truthfully; “I fear only that you should not be content.”

And as signal fires run from point to point, or hill to hill, so she ran from one farmhouse to another, bearing the messages which organised those gatherings whereof Giavacchino Gallo had the knowledge.  The men she summoned and spoke with were rough peasants, for the most part, rude as the untanned skins they wore at their work, but not one of them ever said a gross word or gave a lewd glance to the child.

She was la bimba to them all; a brave little soul and honest; they respected her as if she were one of their own children, or one of their own sisters, and Nernia coming through the starlight, with an old musket slung at her back, which Adone had taught her to use, and her small, bronzed feet leaping over the ground like a young goat’s, was a figure which soon became familiar and welcome to the people.  She seemed to them like a harbinger of hope; she had few words, but those words reverberated with courage and energy; she moved the supine, she braced the timid; she brought the wavering firmness and the nervous strength; she said what Adone had taught her to say, but she put into it all her own immense faith in him, all her own innocent and undoubting certainty that his cause was just and would be blessed by heaven.

The Edera water belonged to them.  Would they let it be turned away from their lands and given to strangers?

As a little spaniel or beagle threshes a covert, obedient to his master’s will and working only to please him, so she scoured the country-side and drove in, by persuasion, or appeal, or threat, all those who would lend ear to her, to the midnight meetings on the moors, or in the homesteads, where Adone harangued them, with eloquence ever varied, on a theme which was never stale, because it appealed at once to the hearts and to the interests of his hearers.