“That is rubbish,” said the older woman roughly. “The woods are dumb, like the beasts they harbour.” Muriella did not reply. They were not dumb to her, nor were the beasts either, but she was shy in speech, and the sympathies which moved within her were rather instincts than conscious feelings. She was not often capable of unravelling and explaining them, and the good Caterina did not invite such confidences. “You are a ripe cherry, and Fausto is a wasp,” said Caterina darkly, clinging to her ideas. “I am a cherry that stings like a nettle,” answered the younger woman with her slow, faint smile. “Don’t trust to that,” said the older woman. “Well, it is late; get you to bed.” In a few minutes’ time both she and her guest were sound asleep in the dreamless slumber of healthy fatigue. V. When the morning broke over the Umbrian Mountains on the far east, the girl was away on foot back to her uncle’s house, before the sun had risen high enough to be seen over the black ridge of the easterly woods. Her uncles cast evil looks at her on her arrival, but, to her surprise, no one said anything in allusion to the incident of the previous day. They owed her a heavy grudge, but they did not fritter it out in words. Vengeance would keep in the Selve. It is a good wine; the best of all wines, to their thinking. “I should be wiser to leave them,” she thought often in the day which followed. “I can get my bread anywhere.” But her heart clung to the woods as she had said; they were her friends: all she had to love. She knew every big tree in them, as a priest knows each one of his flock. She loved their liberty, their solitude, their silence, their brown deep pools, their impenetrable brakes where none but the wild pig could push his way, their green twilight, dim even in noonday, the profound stillness of their winter days and summer eves; she clung to these with all her heart, though without full measure or consciousness of why she did so. The hare with its large tender eyes, the bird with its flood of song, the meadow-sweet with its plume of snow, the birch with its bands of silver, the oak with its russet-brown trunk--these were all nearer to her than the family with which she lived. From the silence and shadow of the woods she derived a pleasure that was inarticulate but keen, and when she saw the mules straining under a rain of blows, the cows lowing in vain for their ravished offspring, the troops of weary goats toiling through the dust of the high-road, the suffering creatures seemed nearer to her than the men who cut their throats, or stunned their brains with repeated blows. To all those around her such victims were no more than bits of wood, and the torture of them was the chief pastime of young and old; but she had been created with a different soul. It was dumb, like that of the cows and the goats, but it was alive.