e not ill. I saw a youth running towards the mountain when I went
to the well."

"I cannot tell. When the pestilence came, a great many people went
away, and drove off the cows and goats. Give me more water!"

Romola, suspecting that if she followed the direction of the youth's
flight, she should find some men and women who were still healthy and
able, determined to seek them out at once, that she might at least win
them to take care of the child, and leave her free to come back and see
how many living needed help, and how many dead needed burial. She
trusted to her powers of persuasion to conquer the aid of the timorous,
when once she knew what was to be done.

Promising the sick woman to come back to her, she lifted the dark
bantling again, and set off towards the slope. She felt no burden of
choice on her now, no longing for death. She was thinking how she would
go to the other sufferers, as she had gone to that fevered woman.

But, with the child on her arm, it was not so easy to her as usual to
walk up a slope, and it seemed a long while before the winding path took
her near the cow and the goats. She was beginning herself to feel faint
from heat, hunger, and thirst, and as she reached a double turning, she
paused to consider whether she would not wait near the cow, which some
one was likely to come and milk soon, rather than toil up to the church
before she had taken any rest. Raising her eyes to measure the steep
distance, she saw peeping between the boughs, not more than five yards
off, a broad round face, watching her attentively, and lower down the
black skirt of a priest's garment, and a hand grasping a bucket. She
stood mutely observing, and the face, too, remained motionless. Romola
had often witnessed the overpowering force of dread in cases of
pestilence, and she was cautious.

Raising her voice in a tone of gentle pleading, she said, "I came over
the sea. I am hungry, and so is the child. Will you not give us some
milk?"

Romola had divined part of the truth, but she had not divined that
preoccupation of the priest's mind which charged her words with a
strange significance. Only a little while ago, the young acolyte had
brought word to the Padre that he had seen the Holy Mother with the
Babe, fetching water for the sick: she was as tall as the cypresses, and
had a light about her head, and she looked up at the church. The
pievano [parish priest] had not listened with entire belief: he