To her own relatives she seemed a fool; only they knew that she was not a fool, because they could not fool her; and her brown, well-shaped hand had before now taken a cruel shepherd by the scruff of his neck and tossed him into a running stream, or on to a bed of nettles. For she was very strong, with that marvellous strength created by air and exertion alone in those whose food is but black bread and herbs. The work she had to do was of the roughest. The only rest she knew was when she sat down to the _telaio_, the board at which she weaved the rude hempen linen in use in the family. But this did not trouble her; she was young and active, and it would have hurt her more to have her energies and strength pent up unused than to strain them to the utmost in the outdoor labours of the croft and wold. The idea of going elsewhere appalled her, not from any peril which might lie in such wanderings, but from the force of habit and affection which bound her to the soil. She knew that in any other place she would feel like the homeless squirrel whom the forest fire has chased from its familiar nest in the old chestnut bole, and driven out to wander forlorn over charred moss and smouldering turf, knowing its homeward path no more. A few days later Cyrille saw her as he went on one of his daily rides through the woods. He stopped his horse and spoke to her. “I have not thanked you for what you did at San Vitale the other day,” he said, as she straightened her back and looked up at him from her kneeling posture, where she was cutting dead canes. “But I am afraid it may have made ill-feeling between you and your uncles. Has it done so?” “There is little love ever between us,” she answered. “Their thoughts are not my thoughts, nor their ways mine.” “Would it not be better to leave them?” “No doubt.” “Shall I ask Caterina to find you work with us?” “No, sir.” “Why not?” “It would not suit me.” She grew a little red as she answered. Messir Faustone had persecuted her with coarse courtship. “You cannot be happy amongst people whose conduct is alien and offensive to you,” he said. She drew down some more canes thoughtfully, and cut them through, and cast them on the ground beside others already cut. “Happy! what is that?” she said, with a genuine ignorance which had nothing cynical. “That is the way you talk. We do not.” Through Cyrille’s mind there drifted the line of Goethe--“When to the passing day,” etc.--and that other sentence of Théroigne de Mericourt--“Doth not the child smile in its mother’s face under Tiberius as under Trajan?” “There are natural joys, surely, given even to the humblest in all times,” he said, with a little hesitation. The beautiful mouth of Muriella curled with a little scorn.