“You have been good to me,” said Nerina; and from the bottom of her heart she thought so.  “I came to see if you wanted me,” she added humbly.

“No, no.  They think ill of you for going my errands.  Poor child, I have done you harm enough.  I will not do you more.”

“You have done me only good.”

“What!  When my mother has turned you out of the house!”

“It is her right.”

“Let it be so for a moment.  You shall come back.  You are with old Alaida?”

“Yes.”

“How can you be out to-night?”

“She sleeps heavily, and the lock is not hard.”

“You are a brave child.”

“Is there nothing to do to-night?”

“No, dear.”

“Where do you go?”

“To meet the men at the tomb of Asdrubal.”

“Who summoned them?”

“I myself.  You must be sad and sorry, child, and it is my fault.”

She checked a sob in her throat.  “I am not far away, and old Alaida is kind.  Let me go on some errand to-night?”

“No, my dear, I cannot.”

He recalled the words of the message which he had received from Don Silverio that day.  He knew the justice of this message, he knew that it only forbade what all humanity, hospitality, manhood, and compassion forbade to him.  One terrible passion had warped his nature, closed his heart, and invaded his reason to the exclusion of all other thoughts or instincts; but he was not yet so lost to shame as, now that he knew what he had done, to send out a female creature into peril to do his bidding.

“Tell me, then, tell me,” pleaded Nerina, “when will anything be done?”

“Whenever the foreign labourers come to work on the water we shall drive them away.”

“But if they will not go?”

“Child, the river is deep; we know its ways and its soundings; they do not.”

Her great bright eyes flashed fire:  an unholy joy laughed in them.

“We will baptize them over again!” she said; and all her face laughed and sparkled in the moonlight.  There was fierce mountain blood in her veins; it grew hot at the thought of slaughter like the juice of grapes warmed in an August noon.

He laughed slow, savagely.  “Their blood will be on their own heads!”

He meant to drive them out, swamp them in the stream, choke them in the sand, hunt them in the heather; make every man of them rue the day that ever they came thither to meddle with the Edera water.

“Curse them!  Their blood will be on their own heads!” he said between his teeth.  He was thinking of the strange men who it was said would be at work on the land and the water before the moon, young now, should be in her last quarter; men hired by the hundreds, day-labourers of the Romagna and the Puglie, leased by contract, marshalled under overseers, different in nothing from slaves who groan under the white man’s lash in Africa.