less
skin. She was silent.

"It has not gone as far as you think," she muttered, after a pause.

"But I will not be accused for nothing," she added. "Tasso shall have
what he thinks he has had. Why would he marry me? He knew I hated him.
We were all very poor down there by Bocca d'Arno, but we were gay and
happy. Why did he take me away?"

The tears started to her eyes and rolled down her hot cheeks. It was the
hundredth time that she had told her sorrows to Gesualdo, in the
confessional and out of it: it was an old story, of which she never
tired of the telling. Her own people were far away by the sea-shore, and
she had no friends in Marca, for she was thought a "foreigner," not
being of that country-side, and the women were jealous of her beauty,
and of the idle life which she led in comparison to theirs, and of the
cared-for look of her person. Gesualdo seemed a countryman, and a
relative, and a friend. She took all her woes to him. A priest was like
a woman, she thought; only a still safer confidant.

"You are ungrateful, my daughter," he said, now, with an effort to be
severe in reprimand. "You know that you were glad to marry so rich a man
as Tassilo. You know that you father and mother were glad, and you
yourself likewise. No doubt the man is not all that you could wish, but
you owe him something; indeed, you owe him much. I speak to you now out
of my office, only as a friend. I would entreat you to send your lover
away. If not, there will be crime, perhaps bloodshed, and the fault of
all that may happen will be yours."

She gave a gesture which said that she cared nothing, whatever might
happen. She was in a headstrong and desperate mood; she had had a
violent quarrel with her husband, and she loved Falko Melegari, the
steward of the absent noble who owned the empty, half-ruined palace
which stood on the banks of the river; he was a fair and handsome young
man, with Lombard blood in him, tall, slender, vigorous, amorous and
light-hearted,--the strongest of contrasts in all ways to Tasso Tassilo,
taciturn, feeble, sullen, and unlovely, and twice the years of his wife.

There was not more than a mile between the mill-house and the deserted
villa; Tassilo might as well have tried to arrest the sirocco or the
mariner's winds, when they blew, as prevent an intercourse so favored
and so facilitated by circumstances. The steward had a million reasons
in a year to visit the mill, and when the miller insulted him a