"You are wrong, my daughter," said Gesualdo, sternly. He colored; he knew not why. "I know nothing of these passions," he added, with some embarrassment; "but I know what duty is, and yours is clear." He did not know much of human nature, and of woman nature nothing, yet he dimly comprehended that Generosa was now at that crisis of her life when all the ardors of her youth and all the delight in her own power made her passionately rebellious against the cruelties of her fate; when it was impossible to make duty look other than hateful to her, and when the very peril and difficulty which surrounded her love-story made it the sweeter and more irresistible to her. She was of a passionate, ardent, careless, daring temperament; and the dangers of the intrigue which she pursued had no terrors for her, whilst the indifference which she had felt for years for her husband had deepened of late into hatred. "One is not a stick, nor a stone, nor a beam of timber, nor a block of granite, that one should be able to live without love all one's days!" she cried, with passion and contempt. She threw the branches of pomegranate over the hedge, gave him a glance half contemptuous and half compassionate, and left the church door. "After all, what should he understand!" she thought. "He is a saint, but he is not a man." Gesualdo looked after her a moment as she went over the court-yard and between the stems of the cypresses out towards the open hill-side. The sun had set; there was a rosy after-glow which bathed her elastic figure in a carmine light; she had that beautiful walk which some Italian women have who have never worn shoes in the first fifteen years of their lives. The light shone on her dusky auburn hair, her gold ear-rings, the slender column of her throat, her vigorous and voluptuous form. Gesualdo looked after her, and a subtile warmth and pain passed through him, bringing with it a sharp sense of guilt. He looked away from her and went within his church and prayed. That night Falko Melegari had just alighted from the saddle of his good gray horse, when he was told that the parocco of San Bartolo was waiting to see him. The villa had been famous and splendid in other days; but it formed now only one of the many neglected possessions of a gay young noble, called Ser Baldo by his dependents, who spent what little money he had in pleasure-places out of Italy, seldom or never came near his estates, and accepted without investigation all such statements of accounts as his various men of business were disposed to send to him.