e whole village seemed out,--man,
woman, and child: the nightingales grew dumb under the outcry.

"What is it?" asked Gesualdo.

Several voices shouted back to him, "Tasso Tassilo has been murdered!"

"Ah!"

Gesualdo gave a low cry, and leaned against the stem of a cypress-tree
to save himself from falling. What use had been his words that night!

The murdered man had been found lying under the canes on the wayside not
a rood from the church. A dog smelling at it had caused the body to be
sought out and discovered. He had been dead but a few hours,--apparently
killed by a knife thrust under his left shoulder, which had struck
straight through the heart.

The agitation in the people was unimaginable, the uproar deafening. Some
one with a grain of sense remaining had sent for the carabineers, but
their picket was two miles off, and they had not yet arrived. The dead
man still lay where he had fallen: every one was afraid to touch him.

"Does his wife know?" said Gesualdo, in a strange, hoarse voice.

"His wife will not grieve," said a man in the crowd, and there was a
laugh, subdued by awe and the presence of death and of the priest.

Gesualdo, with a strong shudder of disgust, held up his hand in horror
and reproof, then bent over the dead body where it lay among the reeds.

"Bring him to the sacristy," he said to the men nearest him. "He must
not lie there, like a beast unclean, by the roadside. Go fetch a
hurdle,--a sheet,--anything."

But no one of them would stir.

"If we touch him they will take us up for murdering him," they muttered,
as one man.

"Cowards! Stand off: I will carry him in-doors," said the priest.

"You are in full canonicals!" cried Candida, twitching at his sleeve.

But Gesualdo did not heed her. He was brushing off with a tender hand
the flies which had begun to buzz about the dead man's mouth. The flies
might have stung and eaten him all the day through for what any one of
the little crowd would have cared: they would not have stretched a hand
even to drag him into the shade.

Gesualdo was a weakly man; he had always fasted long and often, and had
never been strong from his birth; but indignation, compassion, and
horror for the moment lent him a strength not his own: he stooped down
and raised the dead body in his arms, and, staggering under his burden,
he bore it the few roods which separated the place where it had fallen
from the church and the vicar's house.

The people loo