nd
forbade him his doors he had no power to prevent him from fishing in the
waters, from walking on the bank, from making signals from the villa
terraces and appointments in the canebrakes and the vine-fields. Nothing
could have broken off the intrigue except the departure of one or the
other of the lovers from Marca. But Falko Melegari would not go away
from a place where his interests and his passions both combined to hold
him; and it never entered the mind of the miller to take his wife
elsewhere. He had dwelt at the mill all the years of his life, and his
forefathers for five generations before him. To change their residence
never occurs to such people as these: they are fixed, like the
cypress-trees, in the ground, and dream no more than they of new homes.
Like the tree, they never change till death fells them. Generosa
continued to pour out her woes, leaning against the pillar of the porch,
and playing with a twig of pomegranate, whose buds were not more scarlet
than her own lips; and Gesualdo continued to press on her his good
counsels, knowing all the while that he might as well speak to the
swallows under the church eaves, for any benefit that he could effect.
In sole answer to the arguments of Gesualdo she retorted in scornful
words.

"You may find duty enough for you because you are a saint," she added,
with less of reverence than of disdain; "but I am no saint, and I will
not spend all my best days tied to the side of a sickly and sullen old
man."

"You are wrong, my daughter," said Gesualdo, sternly. He colored; he
knew not why. "I know nothing of these passions," he added, with some
embarrassment; "but I know what duty is, and yours is clear."

He did not know much of human nature, and of woman nature nothing, yet
he dimly comprehended that Generosa was now at that crisis of her life
when all the ardors of her youth and all the delight in her own power
made her passionately rebellious against the cruelties of her fate; when
it was impossible to make duty look other than hateful to her, and when
the very peril and difficulty which surrounded her love-story made it
the sweeter and more irresistible to her. She was of a passionate,
ardent, careless, daring temperament; and the dangers of the intrigue
which she pursued had no terrors for her, whilst the indifference which
she had felt for years for her husband had deepened of late into hatred.

"One is not a stick, nor a stone, nor a beam of timber, nor a