The winter passed away, and with February the corn spread a green carpet everywhere, the almond-trees blossomed on the hill-sides, the violets opened the way for the wind-flowers, and the willows budded beside the water-mill. There were braying of bugles, twanging of lutes, cracking of shots, drinking of wines on the farms and in the village as a rustic celebration of Carnival. Not much of it, for times are hard and men's hearts heavy in these days, and the sunlit grace and airy gayety natural to it are things forever dead in Italy, like the ilex forests and the great gardens that have perished for ever and aye. Lent came, with its church-bells sounding in melancholy iteration over the March fields, where the daffodils were blowing by millions, and the parocco of San Bartolo fasted and prayed and mortified his flesh in every way that his creed allowed, and hoped by such miseries, pains, and penances to attain grace in heaven, if not on earth, for Generosa in her misery. All through Lent he wearied the ear of God with incessant supplication for her. Day and night he racked his brain to discover any evidence as to who the assassin had been. He never once doubted her: if the very apostles and saints of his Church had all descended on earth to witness against her, he would have cried to them that she was innocent. The sickening suspicions, the haunting, irrepressible doubts, which now and then came over the mind of her lover as he walked to and fro by the edge of the river at night, looking up at what had been the casement of her chamber, did not assail for an instant the stronger faith of Gesualdo, weak as he was in body and, in some ways, weak in character. The truth might remain in horrid mystery, in impenetrable darkness, forever; it would make no difference to him; he would be always convinced that she had been innocent. Had he not known her when she was a little, barefooted child, coming flying through the shallow green pools and the great yellow grasses and the sunny canebrakes of the Bocca d'Arno? Most innocent, indeed, had been his relations with the wife of Tassilo, but to him it seemed that the interest he had taken in her, the pleasure he had felt in converse with her, had been criminal. There had been times when his eyes, which should have only seen in her a soul to save, had become aware of her mere bodily beauty, had dwelt on her with an awakening of carnal admiration. It sufficed to make him guilty in his own sight. This agony which he felt for her was the sympathy of a personal affection. He knew it, and his consciousness of it flung him at the feet of his crucifix in tortures of conscience.