Meanwhile the prospect of the wedding had stirred up every one in the house to a sort of aimless activity.  Adamo strode about, his sad, lazy eyes gazing nowhere in particular.  Adamo affected to work hard, but in reality he did nothing but sweep the leaves away from the border of the fountain, and remove the debris caused by the fire.  Then he would go down and feed the dogs, who, when at home, lived in a sort of cave cut out of the cliff under the tower—­Argo, the long-haired mastiff, and Tootsey, the rat-terrier, and Juno, the lurcher, and the useless bull-dog, who grinned horribly—­Adamo fed them, then let them out to run at will over the flowers, while he went to his mid-day meal.

Adamo had no soul for flowers, or he could not have done this; he could not have seen a bright, many-eyed balsam, or an amber-leaved zinnia with tufted yellow breast, die miserably on their earthy beds, trampled under the dogs’ feet.  Even the marchesa, who concerned herself so little with such things, had often hidden him for his carelessness; but Adamo had a way of his own, and by that way he abided, slowly returning to it, spite of argument or remonstrance.

“Domine Dio orders the weather, not I,” Adamo said in a grunt to Pipa when his mistress had specially upbraided him for not watering the lemon-trees ranged along the terraces.  “Am I expected to give holy oil to the plants as Fra Pacifico does to the sick?  Che! che! what will be will be!”

So Adamo went to his dinner in all peace; and Argo and his friends knocked down the flowers, and scratched deep holes in the gravel, barking wildly all the time.

The marchesa, sitting in grave confabulation with Cavaliere Trenta, rubbed her white hands as she listened.

There was neither portcullis, nor moat, nor drawbridge to her feudal stronghold at Corellia, but there was big, white Argo.  Argo alone would pin any one to the earth.

“Let out the dogs, Adamo,” the marchesa would say.  “I like to hear them.  They are my soldiers—­they defend me.”

“Yes, padrona,” Adamo would reply, stolidly.  “Surely the Signora Marchesa wants no other.  Argo has the sense of a man when I discourse to him.”

So Argo barked and yelped, and tore up and down undisturbed, followed by the pack in full chase after imaginary enemies.  Woe betide the calves of any stranger arriving at that period of the day at the villa!  They might feel Argo’s glistening teeth meeting in them, or be hurled on the ground, for Argo had a nasty trick of clutching stealthily from behind.  Woe betide all but Fra Pacifico, who had so often licked him in drawn battles, when the dog had leaped upon him, that now Argo fled at sight of his priestly garments with a howl!

Adamo, who, after his mid-day meal, required tobacco and repose, would not move to save any one’s soul, much less his body.

“Argo is a lunatic without me,” he would observe, blandly, to Pipa, if roused by a special outburst of barking, the smoke of his pipe curling round his bullet-head the while.  “Lunatics, either among men or beasts, are not worth attending to.  A sweating horse, a crying woman, and a yelping cur, heed not.”