There was one farm with a stream plunging past it, and, by the house wall, a locked mill-wheel (God knows what it had ever ground), and by the door below it a woman, seated on a flight of steps, with her bosom half-covered and a sucking-child laid asleep in her lap.  She blinked in the sunshine as we came across the yard to her, and said she—­

“Salutation, O strangers, and pardon that I cannot rise:  but the little one is sick of a fever and I fear to stir him, for he makes as if he would sleep.  Nor is there any one else to entertain you, since my husband has gone down to the marina to fetch the wise woman who lives there.”

The Princess stepped close and stood over her. “O paesana,” said she, “do you and your man live here alone, so far up the mountain?”

“There is the bambino,” said the mother, simply.  “He is my first—­ and a boy, by the gift of the Holy Virgin.  Already he takes notice, and soon he will be learning to talk:  but since we both talk to him and about him, you may say that already there are three of us, and anon the good Lord may send us others.  It is hard work, O bella donna, on such a farm as ours, and doubly hard on my husband now for these months that I have been able to help him but little.  But with a good man and his child—­if God spare the child—­I shall want no happiness.”

“Give me the child,” said the Princess, taking a seat on the stone slab beside her.  “He shall not hurt with me while you fetch us a draught of milk.”

The woman stared at her and at me, fearfully at first, then with a strange look in her eyes, between awe and disbelief and a growing hope.

“Even when you came,” she said hoarsely after a while, “I was praying for an angel to help my child. . . .  O blind, O hard of faith that I am!  And when I lifted my eyes and saw you, I bethought me not that none walk this mountain by the path you have come, nor has this land any like you twain for beauty and stature. . . .  O lady—­whether from heaven or earth—­you will not take my child but to cure it?  He is my only one.”

“Give him to me.”

The woman laid her child in the Princess’s arms and ran into the house, throwing one look of terror back at us from the doorstep.  The Princess sat motionless, gazing down on the closed lids, frowning, deep in thoughts I could not follow.

“You will not,” said I, “leave this good foolish soul in her error?”

“I have heard,” she answered quietly, without lifting her eyes, “that a royal touch has virtue to heal sometimes—­and there was a time when you claimed to be King of Corsica.  Nay, forgive me,” she took herself up quickly, “there is bitterness yet left in me, but that speech shall be the last of it. . . .  O husband, O my friend, I was thinking that this child will grow into a man; and of what his mother said, that there is such a thing as a good man:  and I am trying to believe her. . . . Eccu! he sleeps, poor mite!  Listen to his breathing.”