He understood; hunger and heat, foul air in their sleeping places, infusoria in the ditch and rain water, and excessive toil in the extremes of heat and cold, make gaps in the ranks of these hired bands every year as if a cannon had been fired into them.

“Who takes care of you now?” he asked with pity, as for a homeless bitch.

“Nobody.  There is nobody.  They are all gone down into the earth.”

“But how do you live?”

“I work when I can.  I beg when I cannot.  People let me sleep in the stalls, or the barns, and give me bread.”

“That is a bad life for a girl.”

She shrugged her shoulders.

“I did not make it.”

“And where are you going?”

She opened her arms wide and swept the air with them.

“Anywhere.  Along the water, until I find something to do.”

“I cannot do much,” she added, after a pause.  “I am little, and no one has taught me.  But I can cut grass and card wool.”

“The grass season is short, and the wool season is far off.  Why did you not stay in your village?”

She was mute.  She did not know why she had left it, she had come away down the mountainside on a wandering instinct, with a vague idea of finding something better the farther she went:  her father had always come back with silver pieces in his pocket after his stay down there in those lands which she had never seen, lying as they did down far below under the golden haze of what seemed an immeasurable distance.

“Are you not hungry?” said the fisher.

“I am always hungry,” she said, with some astonishment at so simple a question.  “I have been hungry ever since I can remember.  We all were up there.  Sometimes even the grass was too dried up to eat.  Father used to bring home with him a sack of maize; it was better so long as that lasted.”

“Are you hungry now?”

“Of course.”

“Come to my house with me.  We will feed you.  Come.  Have no fear.  I am Adone Alba, of the Terra Vergine, and my mother is a kind woman.  She will not grudge you a meal.”

The child laughed all over her thin, brown face.

“That will be good,” she said, and leapt up out of the water.

“Poor soul!  Poor soul!” thought the young man, with a profound sense of pity.

As the child sprang up out of the river, shaking the water off her as a little terrier does, he saw that she must have been in great want of food for a long time; her bones were almost through her skin.  He set his fishing pole more firmly in the ground, and left the net sunk some half a yard below the surface; then he said to the little girl: 

“Come, come and break your fast.  It has lasted long, I fear.”

Nerina only understood that she was to be fed; that was enough for her.  She trotted like a stray cur, beckoned by a benevolent hand, behind him as he went, first through some heather and broom, then over some grass, where huge olive trees grew, and then through corn and vine lands, to an old farmhouse, made of timber and stone; large, long, solid; built to resist robbers in days when robbers came in armed gangs.  There was a wild garden in front of it, full of cabbage roses, lavender, myrtle, stocks and wallflowers.  Over the arched door a four-season rose-tree clambered.