In her rough way, motherly and unmannerly, she ventured to take her master to task for taking so much interest in a sinner. 'The people of Marca say you think too much about that foul business; they do even whisper that you neglect your holy duties,' she said to him, as she served the frugal supper of cabbage soaked in oil. 'There will always be crimes as long as the world wags on, but that is no reason why good souls should put themselves about over that which they cannot help.' Don Gesualdo said nothing, but she saw the nerves of his mouth quiver. 'I have no business to lecture your reverence on your duties,' she added, tartly; 'but they do say that so much anxiety for a guilty woman is a manner of injustice to innocent souls.' He struck his closed hand on the table with concentrated expression of passion. 'How dare you say that she is guilty?' he cried. 'Who has proved her to be so?' Candida looked at him with shrewd, suspicious eyes as she set down the bottle of vinegar. 'I have met with nobody who doubts it,' she said, cruelly, 'except your reverence and her lover up yonder at the villa.' 'You are all far too ready to believe evil,' said Don Gesualdo, with nervous haste; and he arose and pushed aside the untasted dish and went out of the house. 'He is beside himself for that jade's sake,' thought Candida, and after waiting a little while to see if he returned, she sat down and ate the cabbage herself. Whether there were as many crimes in the world as flies on the pavement in summer, she saw no reason why that good food should be wasted. After her supper, she took her distaff and went and sat on the low wall which divided the church ground from the road, and gossiped with anyone of the villagers who chanced to come by. No one was ever too much occupied not to have leisure to talk in Marca, and the church wall was a favourite gathering place for the sunburnt women with faces like leather under their broad summer hats, or their woollen winter kerchiefs, who came and went to and from the fields or the well or the washing reservoir, with its moss-grown stone tanks brimming with brown water under a vine-covered pergola, where the hapless linen was wont to be beaten and banged as though it were so many sheets of cast-iron. And here with her gossips and friends, Candida could not help letting fall little words and stray sentences which revealed the trouble her mind was in as to the change in her master. She was devoted to him, but her devotion was not so strong as her love of mystery and her impatience of anything which opposed a barrier to her curiosity. She was not conscious that she said a syllable which could have affected his reputation, yet her neighbours all went away from her with the idea that there was something wrong in the presbytery, and that, if she had chosen, the priest's housekeeper could have told some very strange tales.