Anyhow, she took her old servant’s word and allowed the child to remain.  She could not bring herself to turn adrift a female thing to stray about homeless and hungry, and end in some bottomless pit.  The child might be the devil’s spawn.  No one could be sure.  But she had eyes which looked up straight and true, and were as clear as the river water where it flowed over pebbles in the shade.  When the devil is in a soul he always grins behind the eyes; he cannot help it; and so you know him; thus, at least, they thought at Ruscino and in all the vale of Edera; and the devil did not lurk in the eyes of Nerina.

“Have I done right, reverend sir?” asked Clelia Alba of the Vicar of Ruscino.

“Oh, yes—­yes—­charity is always right,” he answered, unwilling to discourage her in her benevolence; but in his own mind he thought, “The child is a child, but she will grow; she is brown, and starved, and ugly now, but she will grow; she is a female thing and she will grow, and I think she will be handsome later on; it would have been more prudent to have put some money in her hand and some linen in her wallet, and have let her pass on her way down the river.  The saints forbid that I should put aloes into the honey of their hearts; but this child will grow.”

Clelia Alba perceived that he had his doubts as she had hers.  But they said nothing of them to each other.  The issue would lie with Time, whom men always depict as a mower, but who is also a sower, too.  However, for good or ill, she was there; and he knew that, having once harboured her, they would never drive her adrift.  Clelia Alba was in every sense a good woman; a little hard at times, narrow of sympathy, too much shut up in her maternal passion; but in the main merciful and correct in judgment.

“If the child were not good the river would not have given her to us,” said Adone to her; and believed it.

“Good-day, my son,” said the voice of the Vicar, Don Silverio Frascara, behind him, where Adone worked in the fields.  “Where did you find that scarecrow whom your mother has shown me just now?”

“She was in the river, most reverend, dancing along in it, as merry as a princess.”

“But she is a skeleton!”

“Almost.”

“And you know nothing of her?”

“Nothing, sir.”

“You were more charitable than wise.”

“One cannot let a little female thing starve whilst one has bread in the hutch.  My mother is a virtuous woman.  She will teach the child virtue.”

“Let us hope so,” said Don Silverio.  “But all, my son, do not take kindly to that lesson.”

“What will be, will be.  The river brought her.”

He credited the river with a more than human sagacity.  He held it in awe and in reverence as a deity, as the Greeks of old held their streams.  It would have drowned the child, he thought, if she had been an evil creature or of evil augury.  But he did not say so, for he did not care to provoke Don Silverio’s fine fleeting ironical smile.