stan bring linen, and spread it over the corpse to
cheat the flies and the gnats of their ghastly repast. No men of law
came. The messengers returned. The picket-house had been closed at dawn,
and the carabineers were away. There was nothing to be done but to wait.
The villagers stood or sat about in the paved court, and in the road
under the cypresses. They seldom had such an event as this in the
dulness of their lives. They brought hunches of bread and ate as they
discoursed of it.

"Will you not break your fast?" said Candida to Gesualdo. "You will not
bring him to life by starving yourself."

Gesualdo made a sign of refusal.

His mouth was parched, his throat felt closed; he was straining his eyes
for the first sight of Generosa on the white road. If she were guilty
she would never come, he thought, to look on the dead man.

Soon he saw her, coming with swift feet and flying skirts and bare head,
through the boles of the cypresses. She was livid; her unbound hair was
streaming behind her.

She had passed a feverish night, locking her door against her husband,
and spending the whole weary hours at the casement where she could see
the old gray villa where her lover dwelt, standing out against the
moonlight among its ilex- and olive-trees. She had had no sense of the
beauty of the night: she had been only concerned by the fret and fever
of a first love and of a guilty passion.

She was not callous at heart, though wholly untrained and undisciplined
in character, and her conscience told her that she gave a bad return to
a man who had honestly and generously adored her, who had been lavish to
her poverty out of his riches, and had never been unkind until a natural
and justified jealousy had embittered the whole current of his life. She
held the offence of infidelity lightly, yet her candor compelled her to
feel that she was returning evil for good, and repaying in a base manner
an old man's unwise but generous affection. She would have hesitated at
nothing that could have united her life to her lover; yet in a corner of
her soul she was vaguely conscious that there was a degree of unfairness
and baseness in setting their youth and their ardor to hoodwink and
betray a feeble and aged creature like Tasso Tassilo. She hated him
fiercely: he was her jailer, her tyrant, her keeper. She detested the
sound of his slow step, of his croaking voice, of his harsh calls to his
men and his horses and mules; the sight of his wit