The thought, he knew not why, turned his mind to Momola, who often on damp evenings sat shaking and burning in the kitchen corner.  He reflected with a pang that he might never see her again, and leaning forward he strained his eyes for a glimpse of Pontesordo.  They were passing through a patch of oaks; but where these ended the country opened, and beyond a belt of osiers and the mottled faded stretches of the marsh the keep stood up like a beckoning finger.  Odo cried out as though in answer to its call; but that moment the road turned a knoll and bent across rising ground toward an unfamiliar region.

“Thank God!” cried his mother, lowering the window, “we’re rid of that poison and can breath the air.”

As the keep vanished Odo reproached himself for not having begged a pair of shoes for Momola.  He had felt very sorry for her since the hunchback had spoken so strangely of life at the foundling hospital; and he had a sudden vision of her bare feet, pinched with cold and cut with the pebbles of the yard, perpetually running across the damp stone floors, with Filomena crying after her :  “Hasten then, child of iniquity!  You are slower than a day without bread!” He had almost resolved to speak of the foundling to his mother, who still seemed in a condescending humour; but his attention was unexpectedly distracted by a troop of Egyptians, who came along the road leading a dancing bear; and hardly had these passed when the chariot of an itinerant dentist engaged him.  The whole way, indeed, was alive with such surprises; and at Valsecca, where they dined, they found the yard of the inn crowded with the sumpter-mules and servants of a cardinal travelling to Rome, who was to lie there that night and whose bedstead and saucepans had preceded him.

Here, after dinner, Don Lelio took leave of Odo’s mother, with small show of regret on either side; the lady high and sarcastic, the gentleman sullen and polite; and both, as it seemed, easier when the business was despatched and the Count’s foot in the stirrup.  He had so far taken little notice of Odo, but he now bent from the saddle and tapped the boy’s cheek, saying in his cold way:  “In a few years I shall see you at court;” and with that rode away toward Pianura.

1.4.

Lying that night at Pavia, the travellers set forward next morning for the city of Vercelli.  The road, though it ran for the most part through flat mulberry orchards and rice-fields reflecting the pale blue sky in their sodden channels, would yet have appeared diverting enough to Odo, had his mother been in the mood to reply to his questions; for whether their carriage overtook a party of strolling jugglers, travelling in a roofed-in waggon, with the younger children of the company running alongside in threadbare tights and trunkhose decked with tinsel; or whether they drove through a village market-place, where yellow earthen crocks and gaudy Indian cottons, brass pails and braziers and platters of bluish pewter, filled the stalls with a medley of colour—­at every turn was something that excited the boy’s wonder; but Donna Laura, who had fallen into a depression of spirits, lamenting the cold, her misfortunes and the discomfort of the journey, was at no more pains than the abate to satisfy the promptings of his curiosity.