How does rsync --daemon know which way it is being run?

I am wanting to run rsync over an SSL/TLS encrypted connection. It does not do this directly so I am exploring options. The stunnel program looks promising, although more complicated than designed due to the need to hop connections with the -r option. However, I do find there is a -l option to run a program. I am assuming this works by having two processes, one to carry out the SSL/TLS work, and one to be the worker which the client is communicating to. These would then communicate by a pipe pair or two way socket between them.

What struck me as odd when I surveyed a number of web pages to see how to properly set this up is that whether running as a standalone daemon, or under a super daemon like inetd, the arguments for rsync are the same. How does rsync --daemon know whether it should open a socket and listen on it for many connections, or just service one connection by communicating with the stdin/stdout descriptors is has when it starts up (which really would go through the extra process to handle the encryption, description, and SSL/TLS protocol layer)?

And then I need to find a way to wrap the client to have it do SSL/TLS in one simple command (as opposed to connection hopping that stunnel seems to favor).