“To be sure, indeed!” echoed Fausto; “whoever saw wild forest land kept as though it were a Madonna’s garden? No goats must crop, no mules must browse, no guns go on the marshes, no nests be taken high or low, no bark be stripped, no undergrowth be cut, no gins be set, nor netting; the Lord grant me patience! The people look to me for help. They come to me weeping and groaning; what can I say? What did he do when I had covered a teal with my gun last June? Struck the barrel up with his stick; and the bird away over the reeds. ‘It’s close time,’ said he. ‘Close time, close time!’ By the Lord! was ever ‘close time’ heard of in those woods? Have we not shot when and where as we chose all the year round? Eh? Many’s the head of game I have got shooting a sitting hare or nesting plover. ‘Close time!’ Great powers above us! Who ever heard tell of the like since the hills were piled one a-top of another? But so it is now, and no redress against it to be got in Rome. ‘All that he does is well done’--no other answer but that. Damnation! I am nothing here any more. I am no more than a sere twig, than a strangled mole. I go to Rome; and what say they to me there? ‘All that he does is well done.’ They will not even hear or enquire, and even the wild boar hunting is stopped. He is a second St Francis. He talks with the pigs and the wolves!” “Do not speak the name of a saint of our Church in the same breath with a vile schismatic outside her pale,” said the elder Franciscan; and he was so greatly shocked that he drank out of the flask of wine nearest him instead of out of his glass tumbler, and only set it down when it was half empty. Muriella, where she sat beside the Massaja, was too far off to hear much that they said, but a little reached her, and she saw the lowering brows and tempestuous gestures of Fausto. She spoke across the length of the table to him. “Your pardon, Messir Fausto,” she said in a clear, steady voice; “you forget to add one thing. For all the feudal rights taken up, there has been paid compensation; it is but the abuse of them which has been checked and stopped.” Fausto looked over the lighted wicks of the brass lamps at the speaker. He was betrothed to the daughter of a wealthy vintner in Montefiascone, but that fact had not closed his eyes to the other fact that the niece of Alcide and Lucio had great and uncommon beauty.