“It is but this, sir; if Nerina enter here, I go.”

“You cannot be serious!”

“If you think so, look at me.”

He did look at her; at her severe aquiline features, at her heavy eyelids drooping over eyes of implacable wrath, at her firm mouth and jaw, cold as if cut in marble.  She was not a woman to trifle or to waver; perhaps she was one who having received offence would never forgive.

“But it is monstrous!” he exclaimed; “you cannot turn adrift a little friendless girl —­ you cannot leave your own house, your dead husband’s house —­ neither is possible —­ you rave!”

“It is my son’s house.  He will harbour whom he will.  But if the girl pass the doorstep I go.  I am not too old to labour for myself.”

“My good woman —­ my dear friend —­ it is incredible!  I see what you believe, but I cannot pardon you for believing it.  Even were it what you choose to think —­ which is not possible —­ surely your duty to a motherless and destitute girl of her tender years should counsel more benevolence?”

The face of Clelia Alba grew chillier and harder still.

“Sir, leave me to judge of my own duties as the mother of Adone, and the keeper of this house.  He has told me that he is master here.  I do not deny it.  He is over age.  He can bring her here if he chooses, but I go.”

“But you must know the child cannot live here with a young man!”

“Why not?” said Clelia Alba, and a cruel smile passed over her face.  “It seems to me more decent than lying out in the fields together night after night.”

“Silence!” said Don Silverio in that tone which awed the boldest.  “Of what avail is your own virtue if it make you thus harsh, thus unbelieving, thus ready to condemn?”

“I claim no more virtue than any clean-living woman should possess; but Valerio Alba would not have brought his leman into my presence, neither shall his son do so.”

“In your present mood, words are wasted on you.  Go to your chamber, Sior’ Clelia, and entreat Heaven to soften your heart.  There is sorrow enough in store for you without your creating misery out of suspicion and unbelief.  This house will not long be either yours or Adone’s.”

He left the kitchen and went out into the air; Clelia Alba was too proud, too dogged, in her obstinancy to endeavour to detain him or to ask him what he meant.

“Where is Adone?” he asked of the old labourer Ettore, who was carrying manure in a great skip upon his back.

“He is down by the five apple-trees, sir,” answered Ettore.

The five apple-trees were beautiful old trees, gnarled, moss-grown, hoary, but still bearing abundant blossom; they grew in a field which was that year being trenched for young vines, a hard, back-breaking labour; the trenches were being cut obliquely, so as not to disturb the apple-trees or injure some fine fig-trees which grew there.  Adone was at work, stripped to his shirt and hidden in the delved earth to his shoulders.