Fausto scowled, and dug his heels into the flanks of his good grey horse. He was not used to be flouted or thwarted. She looked at herself in the brown shallow water of the river’s bed, clear as a mirror, and wondered what Faustone saw that made him so hot in her pursuit. She did not see any good looks in herself; she only saw her sun-browned skin, her dark, rough hair, her strong column-like throat, her brown arms and hands, her bare feet wet with dew and green with moss; she seemed no more to herself than a rude bit of wood shaped into human likeness, such as they found sometimes in the Etruscan tumuli. Fausto might find her handsome, and rest his wicked hot eyes upon her; but she saw nothing in herself. She reached her home, after a long and exhausting walk, and, since the under-steward had seen her, made no secret of her journey to Viterbo. They were all angry that she brought them nothing, but otherwise the matter had no interest for them. She shut her hope up in her soul and waited. In the saints’ good time the saints would set him free. “You mope, girl. What is amiss?” said her uncles to her. “Do I not do my quota of work?” “Nay, we do not say you fail in that.” “Then what matter my looks or my ways to you?” She would brook no interference. She knew that she was worth much more than her keep to them, and they knew it too; if the men had shirts to their backs, and the children had as much bread as they could eat, they owed it chiefly to her. “If she likes to be the light-o’-love of that stranger ’tis no matter to us,” said the women. “She’d do better to be Fausto’s,” replied Alcide. “We’d get a pig out of him come winter.” They would have seen with a favourable eye her welcome of the Roman’s wooings; he was a man after their own taste, who bought and sold, and trafficked and lied, and could fake a colt and outwit a dealer with the best of his time. “She may take her _damo_ where she likes best. But if she tell tales she will be sorry for it,” said Alcide to himself, and set himself to watch her. To do so was easy, for they knew where her day’s work lay every morning when she went out to it; it was nearly always the same according to season. Once or twice he saw her speak with Cyrille. But he saw nothing which looked to him like amorous intercourse. The more sure therefore was he that she played informer to the foreigner’s command. “We have reared a cuckoo,” he said to his wife; but the woman, wiser and shrewder, answered: “We did not rear her. She came full grown or nearly so; and she is not of the temper that makes spies.”