Tasso Tassilo, going on business once to the sea-coast, had chanced to see that handsome face of hers, and had wooed and won her without great difficulty, for her people were poor folk, living by carting sand, and she herself was tired of her bare legs and face, her robust hunger, which made her glad to eat the fruit off the cactus-plants, and her great beauty, which nobody ever saw except the sea-gulls and carters and fishers and cane-cutters, who were all as poor as she was herself. Tasso Tassilo, in his own person, she hated, an ugly, dry, elderly man, with his soul wrapped up in his flour-bags and his money-bags; but he adored her, and let her spend as she chose on her attire and her ornaments; and the mill-house was a pleasant place enough with its walls painted on the outside _in tempora_, and the willows drooping over its eaves, and the young men and the mules loitering about on the land-side of it, and the peasants coming up with corn to be ground whenever there had been rain in summer and so water enough in the river-bed to turn the mill-wheels. In drought the stream was low and its stones dry and no work could be done by the grindstones. There was then only water enough for the ducks to paddle in, and the pretty teal to float in, which they would always do at sunrise unless the miller let fly a a charge of small shot among them from the windows under the roof. "Good-evening, Don Gesualdo," said the miller's wife now, in the midst of the nightingale's song and the orange glow from the sunset. Gesualdo rose with a smile. He was always glad to see her. She had something about her for him of boyhood, of home, of the sea, and of the careless days before he became a seminarist: he did not positively regret that he had entered the priesthood, but he remembered the earlier life wistfully, and with wonder that he could ever have been that light-hearted lad who had run through the canebrakes to plunge into the rolling waters with all the wide gay sunlit world of sea and sky and river and shore before him, behind him, and above him. "What is wrong, Generosa?" he asked her, seeing as he looked up that her handsome face was clouded. Her days were not often tranquil; her husband was jealous, and she gave him cause for jealousy: the mill was a favorite resort of all the young men for thirty miles around, and unless Tasso Tassilo had ceased to grind corn he could not have shut his doors to them. "It is the old story, Don Gesualdo," she answered, leaning against the church porch. "You know what Tasso, is and what a dog's life he leads me." "You are not always prudent, my daughter," said Gesualdo, with a faint smile. "Who could be always prudent at my years?" said the miller's young wife. "Tasso is a brute, and a fool too. One day he will drive me out of myself: I tell him so."