On Sunday afternoon, the narrator brought the two boys in his car to a large red-roofed villa in a tiny village set upon the hillside. After the boys had disappeared beyond the corner of a stone wall, the narrator followed them closely and reached a grilled sideentrance. When he rang the bell, the door was opened by a trained nurse. When she learnt that the narrator had brought the two boys there, she let him in and took him to a ward upstairs, and showed him the two boys seated at the bedside of a girl, aged about twenty.
Later, when the narrator begged her to tell him all she knew about the two boys, she told him that the girl was Lucia, and the boys had no one else in the world except for that sister. The boys had lost their father in the war. Shortly afterwards, a bomb had destroyed their home and thrown the three children into the sheets. For months, they had barely kept themselves alive in a sort of shelter they had built with their own hands amidst the rubble.
During this time they suffered horribly from near-starvation and exposure to the cold Veronese winter. Consequently, their sister contracted tuberculosis of the spine. The two boys admitted their sister in that hospital and worked hard, earned enough money and paid for her treatment regularly.
