He rose and pushed his heavy chair away impatiently; he was ashamed of his own words, but in the most impetuous Italian natures, prudence and self-love are oftentimes the strongest instincts. The priest looked at him with a great scorn in the depths of his dark, deep, luminous eyes. This handsome and virile lover seemed to him a very poor creature; a coward and faithless. 'In the depths of your soul you doubt her yourself!' he said, with severity and contempt, as he turned away from the writing table, and went out through the windows into the garden beyond. 'No, as God lives, I do not doubt her,' cried Falko Melegari. 'Not for an hour, not for a moment. But to make others believe--that is more difficult. I will maintain her and befriend her always if they set her free; but marry her--take her to my people--have everyone say that my wife had been in gaol on suspicion of murder--that I could not do; no man would do it who had a reputation to lose. One loves for love's sake, but one marries for the world's.' He spoke to empty air; there was no one to hear him but the little green lizards who had slid out of their holes in the stone under the window-step. Don Gesualdo had gone across the rough grass of the garden, and had passed out of sight beyond the tall hedge of rose-laurel. The young man resumed his writing, but he was restless and uneasy, and could not continue his calculations of debit and credit, of loss and profit. He took his gun, whistled his dog, and went up towards the hills, where hares were to be found in the heather and snipe under the gorse, for close time was unrecognised in the province. His temper was ruffled, and his mind in great irritation against his late companion; he felt angrily that he must have appeared a poltroon, and a poor and unmanly lover in the eyes of the churchman. Yet he had only spoken, he felt sure, as any other man would have done in his place. In the sympathy of their common affliction, his heart had warmed for awhile to Gesualdo, as to the only one who, like himself, cared for the fate of Tasso Tassilo's wife; but now that suspicion had entered into him, there returned with it all his detestation of the Church and all the secular hatreds which the gentle character of the priest of Marca had for a time lulled in him. 'Of course he is a liar and a hypocrite,' he thought, savagely. 'Perhaps he was a murderer as well!' He knew that the idea was a kind of madness. Don Gesualdo had never been known to hurt a fly; indeed, his aversion to even see pain inflicted had made him often the laughing-stock of the children of Marca when he had rescued birds, or locusts, or frogs, from their tormenting fingers, and forbade them to throw stones at the lambs or kids they drove to pasture. 'They are not baptised,' the children had often said, with a grin, and Gesualdo had often answered: 'The good God baptised them Himself.'