She considered his statement for a moment.

“Well,” she announced, “we use olive oil in our cooking, so we must be dagoes.  I never knew what they were before.  I thought it was slang.”

“And the Samaritan dumped oil on his head,” the tramp muttered reminiscently.  “Seems to me I recollect a sky pilot sayin’ something about that old gent.  D’ye know, I’ve been looking for him off’n’ on all my life, and never scared up hide or hair of him.  They ain’t no more Samaritans.”

“Wasn’t I one?” she asked quickly.

He looked at her steadily, with a great curiosity and wonder.  Her ear, by a movement exposed to the sun, was transparent.  It seemed he could almost see through it.  He was amazed at the delicacy of her colouring, at the blue of her eyes, at the dazzle of the sun-touched golden hair.  And he was astounded by her fragility.  It came to him that she was easily broken.  His eye went quickly from his huge, gnarled paw to her tiny hand in which it seemed to him he could almost see the blood circulate.  He knew the power in his muscles, and he knew the tricks and turns by which men use their bodies to ill-treat men.  In fact, he knew little else, and his mind for the time ran in its customary channel.  It was his way of measuring the beautiful strangeness of her.  He calculated a grip, and not a strong one, that could grind her little fingers to pulp.  He thought of fist-blows he had given to men’s heads, and received on his own head, and felt that the least of them could shatter hers like an eggshell.  He scanned her little shoulders and slim waist, and knew in all certitude that with his two hands he could rend her to pieces.

“Wasn’t I one?” she insisted again.

He came back to himself with a shock—­or away from himself, as the case happened.  He was loth that the conversation should cease.

“What?” he answered.  “Oh, yes; you bet you was a Samaritan, even if you didn’t have no olive oil.”  He remembered what his mind had been dwelling on, and asked, “But ain’t you afraid?”

She looked at him uncomprehendingly.

“Of ... of me?” he added lamely.

She laughed merrily.

“Mamma says never to be afraid of anything.  She says that if you’re good, and you think good of other people, they’ll be good, too.”

“And you was thinkin’ good of me when you kept the sun off,” he marvelled.

“But it’s hard to think good of bees and nasty crawly things,” she confessed.

“But there’s men that is nasty and crawly things,” he argued.

“Mamma says no.  She says there’s good in every one.”

“I bet you she locks the house up tight at night just the same,” he proclaimed triumphantly.

“But she doesn’t.  Mamma isn’t afraid of anything.  That’s why she lets me play out here alone when I want.  Why, we had a robber once.  Mamma got right up and found him.  And what do you think!  He was only a poor hungry man.  And she got him plenty to eat from the pantry, and afterward she got him work to do.”