down on the winding stream as it passed under the ruined walls of Ruscino, and growing, as it flowed, clearer and clearer, and wilder and wilder, as it rushed over stones and boulders, foaming and shouting, rushed through the heather on its way towards the Marches.  Under Ruscino it had its brown mountain colour still, but as it ran it grew green as emeralds, blue as sapphires, silver and white and gray like a dove’s wings; it was unsullied and translucent; the white clouds were reflected on it.  It went through a country lonely, almost deserted, only at great distances from one another was there a group of homesteads, a cluster of stacks, a conical cabin in some places where the woods gave place to pasture; here and there were the ruins of a temple, of a fortress, of some great marble or granite tomb; but there was no living creature in sight except a troop of buffaloes splashing in a pool.

Don Silverio looked down on its course until his dazzled eyes lost it from sight in the glory of light through which it sped, and his heart sank, and he would fain have been a woman to have wept aloud.  For he saw that its beauty and its solitude were such as would likely enough tempt the spoilers.  He saw that it lay fair and defenceless as a maiden on her bed.

He dwelt out of the world now, but he had once dwelt in it; and the world does not greatly change, it only grows more rapacious.  He knew that in this age there is only one law, to gain; only one duty, to prosper:  that nature is of no account, nor beauty either, nor repose, nor ancient rights, nor any of the simple claims of normal justice.  He knew that if in the course of the river there would be gold for capitalists, for engineers, for attorneys, for deputies, for ministers, that then the waters of the Edera were in all probability doomed.

He descended the rotten stairs slowly, with a weight as of lead at his heart.  He did not any longer doubt the truth of what he had read.  Who, or what, shall withstand the curse of its time?

“They have forgotten us so long,” he thought, with bitterness in his soul.  “We have been left to bury our dead as we would, and to see the children starve as they might; they remember us now, because we possess something which they can snatch from us!”

He did not doubt any more.  He could only wait:  wait and see in what form and in what time the evil would come to them.  Meantime, he said to himself, he would not speak of it to Adone, and he burned the news-sheet.  Administrations alter frequently and unexpectedly, and the money-changers, who are fostered by them, sometimes fall with them, and their projects remain in the embryo of a mere prospectus.  There was that chance.