d. "Married? You have said it!"

This seemed enigmatical, but Marcello understood the words to convey an
affirmation.

"Well?" he asked, expecting more.

"Well? Well, what?" growled Ercole. "This is a bad world. A man falls in
love with a pretty little caterpillar; he wakes up and finds himself
married to a butterfly. Oh, this is a very bad world!"

Marcello was struck by the simile, but he reflected that Aurora looked
much more like a butterfly than a caterpillar, a fact which, if it meant
anything, should signify that he knew the worst beforehand. Ercole
declined to enter into any account of his conjugal experiences, and
merely shrugged his shoulders and went on through the sand.

With such fitting and warning as this to keep him out of trouble,
Marcello was to face life: with his saintly mother's timid allusions to
its wickedness, with Corbario's tempting suggestions of harmless
dissipation, with an unlettered peasant's sour reflections on the world
in general and women in particular.

In the other scale of the balance fate set his delicate and high-strung
nature, his burning desire for the great unknown something, the stinging
impatience of bodily weakness, and the large element of recklessness he
inherited from his father, besides a fine admixture of latent boyish
vanity for women to play upon, and all the ordinary weaknesses of human
nature in about the same proportion as every one has them.

Given a large fortune and ordinary liberty, it might be foreseen that
the boy would not reach the haven of maturity without meeting a storm,
even if the outward circumstances of chance were all in his favour, even
if no one had an interest in ruining him, even if Folco Corbario did not
want all for himself, as poor Ercole told his dog that he did in the
solitude of his hut.

Marcello had a bad chance at the start, and Maddalena dell' Armi, who
knew the world well in all its moods, and had suffered by it and sinned
for it, and had shed many tears in secret before becoming what she was
now, foresaw danger, and hoped that her daughter's fate might not be
bound up with that of her friend's son, much as she herself liked the
gentle-hearted boy. She wondered how long any one would call him gentle
after he got his first taste of pleasure and pain.

CHAPTER IV

It was very early morning, and there was no shooting, for a
southwesterly gale had been blowing all night, and the birds passed far
inland. All along the