But his unsupported belief availed nothing to secure that of others: the dominant feeling among the people of Marca was against her, and, in face of that feeling and of the known jealousy of her which had consumed the latter days of the dead man, the authorities deemed that they could do no less than order her provisional arrest. Her very beauty was a weapon turned against her. It seemed so natural to her accusers that so lovely and so young a woman should have desired to rid herself of a husband, old, ill-favored, exacting, and unloved. In vain--utterly in vain--did Falko Melegari, black with rage and beside himself with misery, swear by every saint in the calendar that his relations with her had been hitherto absolutely innocent. No one believed him. "You are obliged to say that," said the judge, with good-humored impatience. "But, God in heaven, why not when it is true?" shouted Falko. "It is always true when the _damo_ is a man of honor?" said the ironical judge, with an incredulous, amused smile. So, her only defenders utterly discredited, she paid the penalty of being handsomer and grander than her neighbors, and was taken to the town of Vendraminõ, and there left to lie in prison until such time as the majesty of the law should be pleased to decide whether or not it deemed her guilty of causing the death of her husband. The people of Marca were content. They only could not see why the law should take such a time to doubt and puzzle over a fact which to them all was as clear as the weather-vane on their church tower. "Who should have killed him, if not she or her _damo_?" they asked, and no one could answer. So she was taken away by the men of justice, and Marca no more saw her handsome head with the silver pins in its coiled hair leaning out from the square mill windows, or her bright-colored skirts going light as the wind up the brown sides of the hills, and through the yellow-blossomed gorse in the warm autumn air, to some trysting-place under the topmost pines, where the wild pigeons dwelt in the boughs above, and the black stoat ran through the bracken below.