Even if they acquitted her in the house of law yonder, she would be dishonoured for life. Even her lover, who loved her with all the sensual, coarse ardour of a young man's uncontrolled desires, had declared that he would be ashamed to walk beside her in broad day so long as this slur of possible, if unproven, crime were on her. Don Gesualdo mused on all these things until his sensitive soul began to take alarm lest it were not a kind of sin to be so occupied with the fate of one to the neglect and detriment of others. Candida saw him growing thinner and more shadow-like every day with ever-increasing anxiety. To fast, she knew, was needful above all for a priest in Lent, but he did not touch what he might lawfully have eaten; the new-laid eggs and the crisp lettuces of her providing failed to tempt him, and no mortal man, she told him, could live on air and water as he did. 'There should be reason in all piety,' she said to him, and he assented. But he did not change his ways, which were rather those of a monk of the Thebaid than of a vicar of a parish. He had the soul in him of a St Anthony, of a St Francis, and he had been born too late; the world as it is was too coarse, and too incredulous, for him, even in a little rustic primitive village hidden away from the eyes of men under its millet and its fig trees. The people of Marca, like his old servant, noticed the great change in him. Pale he had always been, but now he was the colour of his own ivory Christ; taciturn, too, he had always been, yet he had ever had playful words for the children, kind words for the aged; these were silent now. The listless and mechanical manner with which he went through the offices of the Church contrasted with the passionate and despairing cries which seemed to come from his very soul when he preached, and which vaguely frightened a rural congregation who were wholly unable to understand them. 'One would think the good _parocco_ had some awful sin on his soul,' said a woman to Candida one evening. 'Nay, nay; he is as pure as a lamb,' said Candida, twirling her distaff, 'but he was always helpless and childlike, and too much taken up with heavenly things--may the saints forgive me for saying so. He should be in a monastery along with St Romolo and St Francis.' But yet, the housekeeper, though loyalty itself, was, in her own secret thoughts, not a little troubled at the change she saw in her master. She put it down to the score of his agitation at the peril of Generosa Fè; but this in itself seemed to her unfitting in one of his sacred calling. A mere light-o'-love and saucebox, as she had always herself called the miller's wife, was wholly unworthy to occupy, even in pity, the thoughts of so holy a man. 'There could not be a doubt that she had given that knife-stroke amongst the canes in the dusk of the dawn of SS. Peter and Paul,' thought Candida, amongst whose virtues charity had small place; 'but what had the _parocco_ to do with it?'