Lucio cursed him silently for a suspicious, obstinate, niggardly, foreign brute. “Spies on us even when we are nought but a carcass,” he thought, where he sat at the coffin head, cracking nuts to beguile the way. Did no one else pitch their dead into ditches? What matter was it to this white-faced stranger if the old worn-out body were tumbled amongst the weeds and toads at the bottom of a gully? And how did the stranger know that it had been in Lucio’s mind to do away with it so, and to sell the cart and mules somewhere far away, and come back on foot, all tattered and torn, with a well-told tale of robbery and a bare escape with life? “Damn him! he sees through the bones of one’s head what one is thinking,” said the man to himself. The scheme had been ingenious and feasible; it had been planned by Alcide; and now in addition to the disappointment of not carrying it out, Lucio had the dread of his elder’s fury when he should return home, having done nothing better than to really bury the coffin, and return the mules to their stables. Cyrille, who suspected nothing worse than a possible misuse of the church fees, had no idea of the schemes which his presence defeated as he rode on towards the confines of the wood where the high-road passed which led to the dreary, small, walled place, now scarce more than a village, although it had been a stronghold of the Popes in the tenth and eleventh centuries. “Would the body not do just as well left to itself in the woods?” muttered Lucio, as he gave the wooden box a sullen kick. “Yes,” replied Cyrille; “and I should like my own body, when I die, to be laid down under a tree, and left there. But your law and your religion bid you bury your dead, and bury them as they command. You can only obey.” Lucio grumbled inaudibly. For the law he had contempt and hatred, but for religion a dull pagan awe; such as in old Etruscan and Latin days, under these same forest glades, rude men had felt for the terrors of the gods. The little borgo of San Vitale, to which they were bound, stood aloft, looking to the east to Palestrina and Monte Albano. The soil immediately beneath was honeycombed by ancient sepulchres and volcanic fissures; and from a small lake mephitic vapours rose; the hill was barren of vegetation; the walls looked like worm-eaten wood, its towers were in dusty ruin; it resembled a seagull’s nest, which, moth-eaten and cobweb-covered, crumbles away in a naturalist’s closet.