"What are you looking at me like that for? You've always been a fool, my dear fellow--my dear donkey! Just look at you now! calm and amiable as a pope! They've robbed you of everything you possessed, betrayed you, murdered you, knocked you about among them as though you had been a dried skeleton, and there you sit, bland and stupid as ever! Why don't you do something? Why don't you go to that vile woman, and take her, and her mother, and her mother-in-law by the hair of their heads, and tie them to the tails of the cows they offer to give you as a charity, and set fire to their petticoats, and turn them loose in the fields so that they may spread destruction in every direction? Do you understand? I say, do you understand, idiot?" He flung the words in the other's face, his breath heavy with absinthe, his eyes bloodshot. Costantino recoiled, trembling, but the doctor turned to go. On the threshold he paused again and shook his umbrella. "You make me long to break your neck!" he cried. "Men such as you deserve precisely the treatment they get! Well, take a purgative, anyhow, stupid." "Yes, I'll do that," said Costantino, with a laugh, but at the same time the doctor's words made a deep impression on him. There were times, indeed, when he felt utterly desperate. He said over and over again that he meant to go away, but, as a fact, he did not know where to go. Nor, on the other hand, could he see what was to become of him should he decide to remain on in the village. He said to himself: "I have no home, and there is no one belonging to me; for this one day every one rushes to see me out of curiosity, but by to-morrow they will all have forgotten my very existence. I am like a bird that has lost its nest. What is there for me to do?" All the time, though, those words of the doctor's kept ringing in his head. Yes, truly, that would be something for him to do. Go there, fall suddenly upon them like a bolt out of heaven, and utterly destroy all those people who had destroyed his life! "No, Costantino," resumed Uncle Isidoro, as they sat at table, eating the neighbour's white bread and sausage. "No; she is not happy. I have never looked her full in the face _since_, and it gives me a queer feeling to meet her, as though I were meeting the devil! And yet, do you know, I can't help feeling sorry for her. She has a little girl that they tell me is like a young bean, it is so thin and puny. How could a child born in mortal sin be pretty? It was baptised just like a bastard, the priest wouldn't go back to the house, and the people were sneering all along the street." "Ah, do you remember my child?" asked Costantino, cutting off a slice of fat, yellow bacon. "_He_ was not like a bean, not he! Ah, if he had only lived!"