Through those wilds he loved to wander alone; the sweet stillness of a countryside which was uncontaminated by the residence of men stilling the vague unrest of his youth, and the mountains towering in the light lending to the scene the charm of the unknown.

In days of storm or rain he read with Don Silverio or sang in the church; on fine holy-days he roamed far afield in the lonely heatherlands and woodlands which were watered by the Edera.  He carried a gun, for defence if need be, for there were boars and wolves in these solitudes; but he never used it upon bird or beast.

Like St. Francis of Assissi, both he and Don Silverio took more pleasure in the life than in the death of fair winged things.

“We are witness, twice in every year, of that great and inexplicable miracle,” the priest said often, “that passage of small, frail, unguided creatures, over seas and continents, through tempests and simoons, and with every man’s hand against them, and death waiting to take them upon every shore, by merciless and treacherous tricks, and we think nought of it; we care nought for it; we spread the nets and the gins—­that is all.  We are unworthy of all which makes the earth beautiful—­vilely unworthy!”

One of the causes of his unpopularity in Ruscino was the inexorable persistence with which he broke their gins, lifted their nets, cleared off their birdlime, dispersed their watertraps, and forbade the favourite night poaching by lanterns in the woods.  More than once they threatened his life, but he only smiled.

“Faccia pure!” he said, “you will cut a knot which I did not tie, and which I cannot myself undo.”

But they held him in too much awe to dare to touch him, and they knew that again and again he went on bread and water himself to give his wine to their sick, or his strip of meat to their old people.

Moreover, they feared Adone.

“If you touch a hair of Don Silverio’s head, or the hem of his cassock, I will burn Ruscino,” said Adone to one of those who had threatened his friend, “and you will all burn with it, for the river will not help you; the river will turn to oil and make the flames rage tenfold.”

The people were afraid as they heard him, for the wrath of the gentle is terrible from its rarity.

“For sure ’tis the dead Tor’alba as speak in him,” they said with fright under their breath, for there was a tale told in the district that Adone Alba was descended from the old war-lords.

The veterans of the village and the countryside remembered hearing their fathers say that the family of the Terra Vergine were descended from those great marquises who had reigned for centuries in that Rocca which was now a grim, ivy-covered ruin on the north of the Edera water.  But more than this no one could say; no one could tell how the warlike race had become mere tillers of the soil, or how those who had measured out life and death up and down the course of the valley had lost their power and possessions.  There were vague traditions of a terrible siege, following on a great battle in the vale; that was all.