He was beside himself with rage and misery, and the chafing sense of his own impotence; he was young, and strong, and ardently enamoured, and yet he could do no more to save the woman he loved from eternal separation from him than if he had been an idiot or an infant, than if he had had no heart in his breast, and no blood in his veins. Whenever he met the vicar afterwards, he did not even touch his hat, but scowled at him in scorn, and ceased those outward observances of respect to the Church which he had always given before to please his master, who liked such example to be set by the steward to the peasantry. 'If Ser Baldo send me away for it, so he must do,' he thought. 'I will never set foot in the church again. I should choke that accursed _parocco_ with his own wafer.' For suspicion is a poisonous weed which, if left to grow unchecked, soon reaches maturity, and Falko Melegari soon persuaded himself that his own suspicion was a truth, which only lacked time, and testimony, to become as clear to all eyes as it was to his. IV Meantime Don Gesualdo was striving with the utmost force that was in him to persuade the real criminal to confess publicly what he had told under the seal of confession. He saw the man secretly, and used every argument with which the doctrines of his Church and his own intense desires could supply him. But there is no obstinacy so dogged, no egotism so impenetrable, no shield against persuasion so absolute, as the stolid ignorance and self-love of a low mind. The carter turned a deaf ear to all censure as to all entreaty; he was stolidly indifferent to all the woe that he had caused and would cause if he remained silent. What was all that to him? The thought of the miller's widow shut up in prison pleased him. He had always hated her as he had seen her in what he called her finery, going by him in the sunshine, with all her bravery of pearl necklace, of silver hairpins, of gold breast chains. Many and many a time he had thirsted to snatch at them and pull them off her. What right had she to them, she, a daughter of naked, hungry folks, who dug and carted sea and river sand for a living even as he carted sacks of flour. She was no better than himself! Now and then, Generosa had called him, in her careless, imperious fashion, to draw water or carry wood for her, and when he had done so she never had taken the trouble to bid him good day or to say a good-natured word. His pride had been hurt, and he had had much ado to restrain himself from calling her a daughter of beggars, a worm of the sand. Like her own people, he was pleased that she should now find her fine clothes and her jewelled trinkets of no avail to her, and that she should weep the light out of her big eyes, and the rose-bloom off her peach-like cheeks in the squalor and nausea of a town prison.