"You are ungrateful, my daughter," he said, now, with an effort to be severe in reprimand. "You know that you were glad to marry so rich a man as Tassilo. You know that you father and mother were glad, and you yourself likewise. No doubt the man is not all that you could wish, but you owe him something; indeed, you owe him much. I speak to you now out of my office, only as a friend. I would entreat you to send your lover away. If not, there will be crime, perhaps bloodshed, and the fault of all that may happen will be yours." She gave a gesture which said that she cared nothing, whatever might happen. She was in a headstrong and desperate mood; she had had a violent quarrel with her husband, and she loved Falko Melegari, the steward of the absent noble who owned the empty, half-ruined palace which stood on the banks of the river; he was a fair and handsome young man, with Lombard blood in him, tall, slender, vigorous, amorous and light-hearted,--the strongest of contrasts in all ways to Tasso Tassilo, taciturn, feeble, sullen, and unlovely, and twice the years of his wife. There was not more than a mile between the mill-house and the deserted villa; Tassilo might as well have tried to arrest the sirocco or the mariner's winds, when they blew, as prevent an intercourse so favored and so facilitated by circumstances. The steward had a million reasons in a year to visit the mill, and when the miller insulted him and forbade him his doors he had no power to prevent him from fishing in the waters, from walking on the bank, from making signals from the villa terraces and appointments in the canebrakes and the vine-fields. Nothing could have broken off the intrigue except the departure of one or the other of the lovers from Marca. But Falko Melegari would not go away from a place where his interests and his passions both combined to hold him; and it never entered the mind of the miller to take his wife elsewhere. He had dwelt at the mill all the years of his life, and his forefathers for five generations before him. To change their residence never occurs to such people as these: they are fixed, like the cypress-trees, in the ground, and dream no more than they of new homes. Like the tree, they never change till death fells them. Generosa continued to pour out her woes, leaning against the pillar of the porch, and playing with a twig of pomegranate, whose buds were not more scarlet than her own lips; and Gesualdo continued to press on her his good counsels, knowing all the while that he might as well speak to the swallows under the church eaves, for any benefit that he could effect. In sole answer to the arguments of Gesualdo she retorted in scornful words. "You may find duty enough for you because you are a saint," she added, with less of reverence than of disdain; "but I am no saint, and I will not spend all my best days tied to the side of a sickly and sullen old man."