mon flowers and carry them to the tiny grave of
Phoebus, my victim. Once I said to her, "I could not help it: I would
have given my life to save him." She only replied, "If you had consented
to bide at home the child would be living."

Nay, I thought, if she had not looked at me--But of that I said nothing.
I kept the memory of that woman in my heart, and went night and day
about the lake and the river and the marshes of Sant' Aloisa. Once or
twice I saw Taddeo Marchioni, the old count--a gray, shrunken, decrepit
figure of a man, old, with a lean face and a long hard jaw--but of her,
for days that lengthened into weeks, I saw nothing. There are fish in
the Lagherello. I got the square huge net of our country, and set it in
the water as our habit is, and watched in the sedges from dawn to eve.
What I watched for was the coming of the vision I had once seen there:
the fish came and went at their will for me.

One day, sick of watching vainly, and having some good fish in the net,
I dragged them out into the reeds, and pushed them in a creel, and
shouldered them, and went straight to the gloomy walls of Sant' Aloisa.
There were no gates: the sedges of the low lands went along the front of
the great pile, almost touching it. Around it were fields gray with
olives, and there was neither garden nor grass-land: all had been
ploughed up that was not marsh and swamp.

The great doors were close fastened. I entered boldly by a little
entrance at the side, and found myself in the great naked hall of
marble, empty and still and damp. There was a woman there, old and
miserable, who called her master. Taddeo Marchioni came and saw the
fish, and chaffered for them with long hesitation and shrewd greed, as
misers love to do, and then at last refused them: they were too dear, he
said. I threw them down and said to him, "Count, give me a stoup of wine
and they are yours." That pleased him: he bade the serving-woman carry
the fish away, and told me to follow him. He took me into a vaulted
stone chamber, and poured with a niggard hand a glass of _mezzo-vino_. I
looked at him: he was lean, gray, unlovely. I could have crushed him to
death with one hand.

These great old villas in the lone places of Italy are usually full at
least of pleasant life--of women hurrying to the silk-worms and the
spinning and the linen-press, of barefooted men loitering about on a
thousand pleas or errands to their master. But Sant' Aloisa was silent
and empt