He found Gamba’s lodging on the upper floor of a decayed palace in one of the by-lanes near the Cathedral.  The pointed arcades of this ancient building enclosed the remains of floriated mouldings, and the walls of the court showed traces of fresco-painting; but clothes-lines now hung between the arches, and about the well-head in the centre of the court sat a group of tattered women with half-naked children playing in the dirt at their feet.  One of these women directed Odo to the staircase which ascended between damp stone walls to Gamba’s door.  This was opened by the hunchback himself, who, with an astonished exclamation, admitted his visitor to a scantily furnished room littered with books and papers.  A child sprawled on the floor, and a young woman, who had been sewing in the fading light of the attic window, snatched him up as Odo entered.  Her back being turned to the light, he caught only a slender youthful outline; but something in the turn of the head, the shrinking curve of the shoulders, carried him back to the little barefoot figure cowering in a corner of the kitchen at Pontesordo, while the farm-yard rang with Filomena’s call—­“Where are you then, child of iniquity?”

“Momola—­don’t you know me?” he exclaimed.

She hung back trembling, as though the sound of his voice roused an echo of fear; but Gamba, reddening slightly, took her hand and led her forward.

“It is, indeed,” said he, “your excellency’s old playmate, the Momola of Pontesordo, who consents to share my poverty and who makes me forget it by the tenderness of her devotion.”

But Momola, at this, found voice.  “Oh, sir,” she cried, “it is he who took me in when I was half-dead and starving, who many a time went hungry to feed me, and who cares for the child as if it were his own!”

As she stood there, in her half-wild hollowed-eyed beauty, which seemed a sickly efflorescence of the marshes, pressing to her breast another “child of iniquity” as pale and elfish as her former self, she seemed to Odo the embodiment of ancient wrongs, risen from the wasted soil to haunt the dreams of its oppressors.

Gamba shrugged his shoulders.  “Why,” said he, “a child of my own is a luxury I am never likely to possess as long as I have wit to remember the fundamental axiom of philosophy:  entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatum; so it is natural enough fate should single me out to repair the negligence of those who have failed to observe that admirable principle.  And now,” he added, turning gently to Momola, “it is time to put the boy to bed.”

When the door had closed on her Odo turned to Gamba.  “I could learn nothing at Pontesordo,” he said.  “They seemed unwilling to speak of her.  What is her story and where did you first know her?”