Short days or long, dark nights or fine, are all one and the same to those who hate another, and the quietude and comparative industry of her relatives filled her with apprehension as to what evils such unwonted virtues might pertain. Her uncles were certain she was a spy of the steward’s, and said nothing before her which they would not have had repeated from the tree-tops. But the wife of Alcide was imprudent, and let dark innuendoes fall from her. “White birds that come from the North do not always live to go back there,” she said once, and once again said, “Le Selve is full of trees, but the trees can bear three fruits--fire, and steel, and lead.” Muriella knew that they could wait patiently for years when they meditated a revenge, but that they would strike in the end as unerringly as the gerfalcon struck the wood-pigeon. Meantime the saints were long in answering; perhaps what she had done had been too insignificant, yet she could not think so; they would be too generous to despise, too merciful to reject it. “Yes,” she repeated to herself again and again that winter-time; “I will pray always.” Weeks and months went by, and she had no sign from heaven. Once she said to Cyrille: “Do they not call you home?” “No,” he answered in surprise; “what makes you think of things which can never be?” “You will go home,” she repeated. Yet if her prayer were granted, she knew that he would go away from these woods for ever; that his unknown love, of whom she thought as crowned with green hellebore and clothed with the stars, would stretch her arms out from the mists and take him. Meantime the beautiful springtime came and went, with the song of nightingales in the laurel shadows, and the cuckoos calling from the pines, and the marvellous flora of the Agro Romano in blossom all through the woods.