But his unsupported belief availed nothing to secure that of others; the dominant feeling amongst 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-favoured, 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-humoured impatience. 'But, God in Heaven, why not, when it is true?' shouted Falko. 'It is always true when the _damo_ is a man of honour,' 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 neighbours, and was taken to the town of Vendramino, and there left to lie in prison until such time as the majesty of the law should be pleased to decide whether or no 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-coloured 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. The work of the mill went on the same, being directed by the brother of Tassilo, who had always had a share in it, both of labour and profit. The murder still served for food for people's tongues through vintage and onward until the maize harvest and the olive-gathering. As the nights grew long, and the days cold, it ceased to be the supreme theme of interest in Marca; no one ever dreamed that there could be a doubt of the absent woman's guilt, or said a good word for her; and no one gave her any pity for wasting her youth and fretting her soul out in a prison cell, though they were disposed to grant that what she had done had been, after all, perhaps only natural, considering all things.