“I fear that I am,” said Cyrille. “But I have given you my word. I cannot withdraw it now. If any hear of this matter it will not be from me. Go. You are free. Your knife will be given back to you. Treat your cattle decently if you know how; and if I take you, when engaged in this work, a second time, I shall not spare you.” Alcide turned on his heel, and went out of the chamber without a word of gratitude. “The girl betrayed me to him,” he thought. “Thank him? Not I! What does he here? Interloper, and spy, and meddler. He drew me before him last night as if I had been an ox. I will be quits with him before long.” “He dealt better with you than you deserve, you gallows-bird,” said Caterina, as he went across the courtyard. Alcide showed his white even teeth again like a wolf’s, and grinned in her face. No one had betrayed him. Cyrille’s own observations had alone furnished him with indices which he had followed up to proof. But the Italian always believes betrayal to be the cause of all disaster, public or private, and these men were convinced that they had been betrayed; their suspicions settled, naturally, on Muriella. “She was ever an unnatural, ill-feeling wench,” said Alcide. “Always caring for birds and beasts and reptiles, and frowning where we laughed. It is but of a piece with her to serve the stranger and rob us all.” But he did not let her see his suspicions since he had no confirmation of them; he, indeed, went out of his way to be civil and flatter her. “If you can make our poor girls like yourself we shall thank you,” he said more than once. “’Tis those good ways your mother taught you; they were never in our wild blood.” Muriella weighed his compliments at their right worth, and distrusted all he said; but she did not know how passionately he hated her. He was a bad man, she knew, but after all he was her father’s brother, and had given her a home, such as it was. It was miserable in many ways, and made more so than it need have been by filth and want of thrift; but it was a home; it saved her from that errant and lonely life which brings down on any woman so much contempt and derision, and in a rough way they estimated her use to them and feared to lose her. VIII. The winter passed, and no one of the threats against the steward had been fulfilled. The woods with earliest February were again filled with the fragrance of the hellebore, earliest and sweetest herald of the spring. “They will do nothing now, the days are lengthening,” thought Muriella, as her nostrils breathed that pungent perfume of the pale green bells, which she associated in fancy with that lady of the north whom she vaguely and wistfully envied. But though she strove to persuade herself of this she felt no certainty.