“I grieve to hear that,” he answered; and thought, “I fear I have lost my power to cast oil on the troubled waters.”

He entered the great vaulted kitchen and sat down, for he was physically weary, having walked twenty miles in the past night.

“What you feel at liberty to tell me, let me hear,” he said to the old servant.

Gianna told him in her picturesque, warmly-coloured phrase what had passed between Sior’ Clelia and the little girl in the night; and what she had herself said to Adone at dawn; and how Nerina was lying asleep in the hay-loft, being afraid, doubtless, to come up to the house.

Don Silverio listened with pain and indignation.

“What is he about to risk a female child on such errands?  And why is his mother in such vehement haste to say cruel words and think unjust and untrue things?”

“They are unjust and untrue, sir, are they not?” said Gianna.  “But it looked ill, you see; a little creature going out in the middle of the night, and to be sure she was but a vagrant when she came to us.”

“And now —­ how does the matter stand?  Has Adone convinced his mother of the girl’s innocence?”

“Whew!  That I cannot say, sir.  They are upstairs; and their voices were loud an hour ago.  Now they are still.  I had a mind to go up, but I am afraid.”

“Go up; and send Adone to me.”

“He is perhaps asleep, sir; he came across the water at dawn.”

“If so, wake him.  I must speak to him without delay.”

Gianna went and came down quickly.

“He is gone out to work in the fields, sir.  Madama told me so.  If he does not work, the land will go out of cultivation, sir.”

“He may have gone to Nerina?”

“I do not think so, sir.  But I will go back to the stable and see.”

“And beg Sior’ Clelia to come down to me.”

He was left alone a few minutes in the great old stone chamber, with its smell of dried herbs hanging from its rafters and of maize leaves baking in the oven.

The land would go out of cultivation —­ yes! —­ and the acetylene factories would take the place of the fragrant garden, the olive orchards, the corn lands, the pastures.  He did not wonder that Adone was roused to fury; but what fury would avail aught?  What pain, what despair, what tears, would stay the desecration for an hour?  The hatchet would hew it all down, and the steam plough would pass over it all, and then the stone and the mortar, the bricks and the iron, the engines, and the wheels, and the cauldrons, would be enthroned on the ruined soil:  the gods of a soulless age.

“Oh, the pity of it!  The pity of it!” thought Don Silverio, as the blue sky shone through the grated window and against the blue sky a rose branch swung and a swallow circled.

“Your servant, Reverendissimo,” said the voice of Clelia Alba, and Don Silverio rose from his seat.

“My friend,” he said to her, “I find you in trouble, and I fear that I shall add to it.  But tell me first, what is this tale of Nerina?”