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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?"
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.
She went skipping and bounding along, where the path was clear, in all the joy of liberty and rapture of the fresh night air. The hours spent in Alaida's close house in the village had been as terrible to her as his hours in a birdcatcher's hamper are to a wild bird. Up at Ansalda she had always been out of doors, and at the Terra Vergine she had gone under a roof only to eat and sleep.
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. "If I had only known when father was alive," she thought; but even if she had known all she knew now, what could she have done?
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