e said to them, and made the sign
of the cross.

The torrent of words stopped on the lips of the young woman; the miller
scowled, and shrank from the light, and was mute.

"Is this how you keep your vows to heaven and to each other?" said
Gesualdo.

A flush of shame came over the face of the woman; the man drew his hat
farther over his eyes and went out of the kitchen silently. The victory
had been easier than their monitor had expected. And yet of what use was
it? he thought; they were silent out of respect for him. As soon as the
restraint of his presence should be removed they would begin afresh.
Unless he could change their souls, it was of little avail to bridle
their lips for an hour.

There was a wild chafing hatred on one side and a tyrannical, covetous,
dissatisfied love on the other: out of such discordant elements what
peace could come?

Gesualdo shut the wooden shutters of the windows, that others should not
see, as he had seen, into the interior; then he strove to pacify his old
playmate, whose heaving breast, and burning cheeks, and eyes which
scorched up in fire their own tears, spoke of a tempest lulled, not
spent. He spoke with all the wisdom with which study and the counsels of
the Fathers had supplied him, and with what was sweeter and more likely
to be efficacious, a true and yearning wish to save her from herself.
She was altogether wrong, and he strove to make her see the danger and
the error of her ways. But he strove in vain. She had one of those
temperaments, reckless, vehement, pleasure-loving, ardent, and
profoundly selfish, which see only their own immediate gain, their own
immediate desires. When he tried to stir her conscience by speaking of
the danger she drew down on the head of the man she professed to love,
she almost laughed.

"He would be a poor creature," she said, proudly, "if all danger would
not be dear to him for me!"

Gesualdo looked her full in the eyes.

"You know that this matter must end in the death of one man or of the
other. Do you mean that this troubles you not one whit?"

"It will not be my fault," said Generosa; and he saw in her the woman's
lust of vanity, which finds food for its pride in the blood shed for
her, as the tigress does, and even the gentle hind.

He remained an hour or more with her, exhausting every argument which
his creed and his sympathy could suggest to him as having any possible
force in it to sway this wayward and sin-bound soul; but