The marchesa waves her hand majestically, and signs for him to retire.  This the sindaco does with an inward groan at the thought of what is coming on him.

Poor Enrica, feeling as if a curse were on her, cutting her off from all her former life, shrinks back deeper into the corner of the carriage, draws the black veil closer about her face, and sobs aloud.  The marchesa turns her head away.  The driver cracks his long whip over the steaming horses, which move feebly forward with a jerk.  Thus the coach slowly traverses the whole length of the piazza, the wheels rumbling themselves into silence out in a long street leading to another gate on the farther side of the town.

Not another word more is said that night among the townsfolk; but there is not a man at Corellia who does not curse the marchesa in his heart.  Ser Giacomo, the notary, folds up his newspaper in dead silence, puts it into his pocket, and departs.  The lights in the dark cafe, which burn sometimes all day when it is cloudy, are extinguished.  The domino-players disappear.  Oreste and Pilade shut up their shop despondingly.  The baker Pietro comes out no more to cool at the door.  Anyway, there must be bakers, he reflects, to bake the bread; so Pietro retreats, comforted, to his oven, and works frantically all night.  He is safe, Pietro hopes, though he has paid no rent for two whole years, and has sold some of the corn which ought to have gone to the marchesa.

Meanwhile the heavy carriage, with its huge leather hood and double rumble, swaying dangerously to and fro, descends a steep and rugged road embowered in forest, leading to a narrow ledge upon the summit of a line of cliffs.  On the very edge of these cliffs, formed of a dark-red basaltic stone, the marchesa’s villa stands.  A deep, dark precipice drops down beneath.  Opposite is a range of mountains, fair and forest-spread on the lower flanks, rising above into wild crags, and broken, blackened peaks, that mock the soft blue radiance of the evening sky.

CHAPTER II.

WHAT SILVESTRO SAYS.

Silvestro, the steward, is a man “full of conscience,” as people say, deeply sensible of his responsibilities, and more in dread of the marchesa than of the Church.  It is this dread that makes him so emaciated—­hesitate when he speaks, and bend his back and shoulders into a constant cringe.  But for this dread, Silvestro would forgive the poor people more.  He sees such pinching misery every day—­lives in it—­suffers from it; how can he ask those for money who have none?  It is like forcing blood out of a stone.  He is not the man to do it.  Silvestro lives at hand; he hears the rattle of the hail that burns the grapes up to a cinder—­the terrible din of the thunder before the forked lightning strikes the cattle; he sees with his own eyes the griping want of bread in the savage winter-time; his own eyes behold the little