themselves were fragile, and covered with a down similar to the fine plumage which clothes the bodies of newly hatched birds.  The whole outline of the ribs was distinctly visible; down the middle of the breast the skin was divided by a darker line; the navel stood out, like a knot.  The feet, slightly bloated, had assumed the same sallow color as the little hands, which were callous and strewn with warts, with white nails beginning to turn livid.  On the left arm, on the thighs near the groin, and further down, on the knees and along the legs, appeared reddish blotches of scurf.  Every detail of this wretched little body assumed, in the eyes of Giorgio, an extraordinary significance, immobile as it was and fixed forever in the rigidity of death.

“How was he drowned?  Where?” he questioned, lowering his voice.

The man dressed in linen gave, with some show of impatience, the account which he had probably had to repeat too many times already.  He had a brutal countenance, square-cut, with bushy brows, and a large mouth, harsh and savage.  Only a little while after leading the sheep back to their stalls, the lad, taking his breakfast along with him, had gone down, together with a comrade, to bathe.  He had hardly set foot in the water, when he had fallen and was drowned.  At the cries of his comrade, some one from the house overhead on the bluff had hurried down, and wading in up to the knees, had dragged him from the water half dead; they had turned him upside down to make him throw up the water, they had shaken him, but to no purpose.  To indicate just how far the poor little fellow had gone in, the man picked up a pebble and threw it into the sea.

“There, only to there; at three yards from the shore!”

The sea lay at rest, breathing peacefully, close to the head of the dead child.  But the sun blazed fiercely down upon the sand; and something pitiless, emanating from that sky of flame and from those stolid witnesses, seemed to pass over the pallid corpse.

“Why,” asked Giorgio, “do you not place him in the shade, in one of the houses, on a bed?”

“He is not to be moved,” declared the man on guard, “until they hold the inquest.”

“At least carry him into the shade, down there, below the embankment!”

Stubbornly the man reiterated, “He is not to be moved.”

There could be no sadder sight than that frail, lifeless little being, extended on the stones, and watched over by the impassive brute who repeated his account every time in the selfsame words, and every time made the selfsame gesture, throwing a pebble into the sea:—­

“There; only to there.”

A woman joined the group, a hook-nosed termagant, with gray eyes and sour lips, mother of the dead boy’s comrade.  She manifested plainly a mistrustful restlessness, as if she anticipated some accusation against her own son.  She spoke with bitterness, and seemed almost to bear a grudge against the victim.