block of
granite, that one should be able to live without love all one's days!"
she cried, with passion and contempt.

She threw the branches of pomegranate over the hedge, gave him a glance
half contemptuous and half compassionate, and left the church door.

"After all, what should he understand!" she thought. "He is a saint, but
he is not a man."

Gesualdo looked after her a moment as she went over the court-yard and
between the stems of the cypresses out towards the open hill-side. The
sun had set; there was a rosy after-glow which bathed her elastic figure
in a carmine light; she had that beautiful walk which some Italian women
have who have never worn shoes in the first fifteen years of their
lives. The light shone on her dusky auburn hair, her gold ear-rings, the
slender column of her throat, her vigorous and voluptuous form. Gesualdo
looked after her, and a subtile warmth and pain passed through him,
bringing with it a sharp sense of guilt. He looked away from her and
went within his church and prayed.

That night Falko Melegari had just alighted from the saddle of his good
gray horse, when he was told that the parocco of San Bartolo was waiting
to see him.

The villa had been famous and splendid in other days; but it formed now
only one of the many neglected possessions of a gay young noble, called
Ser Baldo by his dependents, who spent what little money he had in
pleasure-places out of Italy, seldom or never came near his estates, and
accepted without investigation all such statements of accounts as his
various men of business were disposed to send to him.

His steward lived on the ground-floor of the great villa, in the vast
frescoed chambers with their domed and gilded ceilings, their sculptured
cornices, their carved doors, their stately couches with the satin
dropping in shreds, and the pale tapestries with the moths and the mice
at work in them. His narrow camp-bed, his deal table and chairs, were
sadly out of place in those once splendid halls; but he did not think
about it: he vaguely liked the space and the ruined grandeur about him,
and all the thoughts he had were given to his love, Generosa, the wife
of Tasso Tassilo. From the terraces of the villa he could see the mill a
mile farther down the stream, and he would pass half the short nights of
the summer looking at the distant lights in it.

He was only five-and-twenty, and he was passionately in love with all
the increased ardor of a forbidd