A goatherd who passed some few days later with his flock on his way to the mountains recognised the little girl.

“You are Black Fausto’s daughter,” he said to her.  “Is he dead?  Eh, well, we must all die.  May his soul rest.”

To Gianna, who questioned him, he said, “Yes, he was a good soul.  Often have I seen him down in the Roman plains.  He worked himself to death.  These gangs of labourers get poor pay.  I saw him also in the hills where this girl comes from, ever so high up, you seem to touch the sky.  I summered there two years ago; he had his womankind in a cabin, and he took all that he got home to them.  Aye, he was a good soul.  We can come away out of the heats, but they have to stay down in them; for the reaping and the sowing are their chief gain, and they get the fever into their blood, and the worms into their bellies, and it kills them mostly before they are forty.  You see, at Ansalda, where he came from, it was snow eight months out of the twelve, so the heats and the mists killed him:  for the air you are born in you want, and if you do not get it in time you sicken.”

“Like enough,” said Gianna, who herself had never been out of sight of the river Edera ever since she had been a babe in swaddling clothes.  “Tell me, gossip, was the child born in wedlock?”

“Eh, eh!” said the goatherd grinning.  “That I would not take on me to say.  But like enough, like enough; they are always ready to go before the priest in those high hills.”

The little girl glided into her place humbly and naturally, with no servility but with untiring willingness and thankfulness.  It seemed to her an amazing favour of heaven to live with these good people; to have a roof over her head and food regularly every day.  Up there in her home, amongst the crags of Ansalda, she had never known what it was not to have a daily hunger gnawing always in her entrails, and making her writhe at night on her bed of dry leaves.  In her thirteen years of life she had never once had enough—­no one ever had.  A full stomach had been a thing unknown.

She began to grow, she began to put a little flesh on her bones; they had cut her hair short, for it had been so rough, and it grew again burnished and bright like copper; colour came into her cheeks and lips; she seemed to spring upward, visibly, like a young cane.  She worked hard, but she worked willingly, and she was well nourished on sound food, though it had little variety and was entirely vegetable; and every day she went down and bathed in the river at the same place where she had sat nude under the dock leaves whilst her skirt dried in the sun.

To her the Terra Vergine was Paradise itself; to be fed, to be clothed, to have a mattress to sleep on, to work amongst the flowers and the grass and the animals—­it was all so beautiful, she thought sometimes that she must be in heaven.

She spoke little.  Since she had been under this roof she had grown ashamed of the squalor and starvation and wretchedness of her past existence.  She did not like to think of it even; it had been no fault of hers, but she felt ashamed that she ever should have been that little, filthy, unkempt, naked thing, grovelling on the clay floor, and fighting for mouldy crusts with the other children on the rock of Ansalda.