“She is a faithful little thing as he said!” the old servant muttered.  “Yes; and such as she are born to labour and to suffer, and to eat the bread of bitterness.”

“Where is she, Pierino?” she said to the old white dog; he was lying on the grass; if the girl were lost, she thought, Pierino would be away somewhere looking for her.

Gianna’s heart was hard against Adone; in a dim way she understood the hopes and the schemes which occupied him, but she could not forgive him for sacrificing to them his mother and this friendless child.  It was so like a man, she said to herself, to tear along on what he thought a road to glory, and never heed what he trampled down as he went —­ never heed any more than the mower heeds the daisies.

In the cattle stalls she found the oxen and the cows already watered, brushed, and content, with their pile of fresh grass beside them; there was no sound in the stables but of their munching and breathing, and now and then the rattle of the chains which linked them to their mangers.

“Maybe she is amongst the hay,” thought Gianna, and painfully she climbed the wide rungs of the ladder which led to the hay loft.  There, sure enough, was Nerina, sound asleep upon the fodder.  She looked very small, very young, very innocent.

The old woman thought of the first day that she had seen the child asleep on the stone bench by the porch; and her eyes grew dim.

“Who knows where you will rest to-morrow?” she thought; and she went backwards down the ladder noiselessly so as not to awaken a sleeper, whose awaking might be so sorrowful.

Gianna went back to the house and busied herself with her usual tasks; she could hear the voices of Adone and Clelia Alba in the chamber above; they sounded in altercation, but their words she could not hear.

It was at dawn that same day that Don Silverio returned from his interviews with Count Corradini and Senatore Gallo.  When he reached Ruscino the little rector of the village in the woods had already celebrated mass.  Don Silverio cleansed himself from the dust of travel, entered his church for his orisons, then broke his fast with bread and a plate of lentils, and whilst the day was still young took the long familiar way to the Terra Vergine.  Whatever the interview might cost in pain and estrangement he felt that he dared not lose an hour in informing Adone of what was so dangerously known at the Prefecture.

“He will not kill me,” he thought; “and if he did, it would not matter much;—­ except for you, my poor little man,” he added to his dog Signorino, who was running gleefully in his shadow.  Gianna saw him approaching as she looked from the kitchen window, and cried her thanks to the saints with passionate gratitude.  Then she went out and met him.

“Praise be to the Madonna that you have come back, reverendissimo!” she cried.  “There are sore trouble and disputes under our roof.”