Ah, since it was hers! She threw it out over the balustrade. It struck against the steep mountain side; fell deeper and deeper; broke loose stones, and certainly shattered itself to pieces. At last a splash was heard down in Simeto. “What right have you to carve Madonnas?” she asked Gaetano. He stood silent. He had never seen Donna Micaela thus. In the moment when she rose up before him she had become tall and stately. The beauty that always came and went in her, like an uneasy guest, was enthroned in her face. She looked cold and inflexible; a woman to win and conquer. “Then you still believe in God, since you carve Madonnas?” she said. He breathed hurriedly. Now it was he who was paralyzed. He had been a believer himself. He knew how he had wounded her. He saw that he had forfeited her love. He had made a terrible, infinite chasm between them. He must speak, must win her over to his side. He began again, but feebly and falteringly. She listened quietly for a while. Then she interrupted him almost compassionately. “How did you become so?” “I thought of Sicily,” he said submissively. “You thought of Sicily,” she repeated thoughtfully. “And why did you come home?” “I came home to cause an insurrection.” It was as if they had spoken of an illness, a chill, that he had contracted, and that could quite easily be cured. “You came home to be our ruin,” she said, sternly. “As you will; as you will,” he said, complying. “You can call it so. As everything is going now, you are certainly right to call it so. Ah, if they had not given me false information; if I had not come a week too late! Is it not like us Sicilians to let the government anticipate us? When I came the leaders were already arrested, the island garrisoned with forty thousand men. Everything lost!” It sounded strangely blank when he said that “everything lost.” And for that which never could be anything, he had lost happiness. His opinions and principles seemed to him now to be dry cobwebs, which had captured him. He wished to tear himself away to come to her. She was the only reality, the only thing that was his. So he had felt before. It came back now. She was the only thing in the world. “They are, however, fighting to-day in Paternó.” “There has been a disagreement by the town-gate,” he said. “It is nothing. If I had been able to inflame all Etna, the whole circle of towns round about Etna! Then they would have understood us! they would have listened to us! Now they are shooting down a few hungry peasants to make a few hungry mouths the less. They do not yield an inch to us.” He strove to break through his cobwebs. Could he venture to go up to her, to tell her that all that was of no importance? He did not need to think of politics. He was an artist; he was free! And he wanted to possess her! Suddenly it seemed as if the air trembled. A shot echoed through the night, then another and another.