Page:In Maremma, by Ouida (vol 1).djvu/82

 impenetrable to the curiosity of her neighbours.

They were not very curious either.

A child was no rare treasure, and there was nothing strange in a lone one being placed with a lone woman who was known to have a little money secured and hidden somewhere. Plenty of people along the coast would have been willing and glad to let Joconda adopt their children, would she have taken them. So without more comment or inquiry the child and the dog were domiciled at the old stone house by the pier in Santa Tarsilla, and there grew and throve, as they best might, in an air that to many was death.

Joconda's first care was to have her friend and director, the priest, baptise the infant, and wash away in holy water the sins of its fathers from its soul. She knew not what it had ever been called, or if it had ever been called anything, but the name of the saint on whose day she had found it, she gave to it, as on the mountain side she had resolved to do. By the sad recluse of Syria the little large-eyed rose-cheeked child of Saturnino and Serapia was named, and Joconda saw a storm-swallow fly beyond