He knew also enough of the past to know how water had been forced to serve the will and the wants of the Roman Consulate and the Roman empire, of how the marble aqueducts had cast the shadow of their arches over the land, and how the provinces had been tunnelled and bridged and canalised and irrigated, during two thousand years, by those whose bones were dust under the Latin soil.  He could not wholly cheat himself, as these unlettered men could do; he knew that if the commerce which has succeeded the Caesars as ruler of the world coveted the waters of Edera, the river was lost to the home of its birth and to him.

“How shall I tell my mother?” he asked himself as he walked back through the fragrant and solitary country.  He felt ashamed at his own helplessness and ignorance.  If courage could have availed anything he would not have been wanting; but all that was needed here was a worldly and technical knowledge, of which he possessed no more than did the trout in the stream.

As he neared his home, pushing his way laboriously through the interlaced bracken and heaths which had never been cut for a score of years, he saw approaching him the tall, slender form of Don Silverio, moving slowly, for the heather was breast high, his little dog barking at a startled wood-pigeon.

“They are anxious about you at your house,” Don Silverio said with some sternness.  “Is it well to cause your mother this disquietude?”

“No, it is not well,” replied Adone.  “But how can I see her and not tell her, and how can I tell her this thing?”

“Women to bear trouble are braver than men,” said the priest.  “They have more patience in pain than we.  I have said something to her; but we need not yet despair.  We know nothing of any certainty.  Sometimes such schemes are abandoned at the last moment because too costly or too unremunerative.  Sometimes they drag on for half a lifetime; and at the end nothing comes of them.”

“You have told my mother?”

“I told her what troubles you, and made you leave your work undone.  The little girl was feeding the cattle.”

Adone coloured.  He was conscious of the implied rebuke.

“Sir,” he said in a low tone, “if this accursed thing comes to pass what will become of us?  What I said in my haste last night I say in cold reason to-day.”

“Then you are wrong, and you will turn a calamity into a curse.  Men often do so.”

“It is more than a calamity.”

“Perhaps.  Would not some other grief be yet worse?  If you were stricken with blindness?”

“No; I should still hear the river running.”

Don Silverio looked at him.  He saw by the set, sleepless, reckless look on his face that the young man was in no mood to be reached by any argument, or to be susceptible to either rebuke or consolation.  The time might come when he would be so; but that time was far off he feared.  The evenness, the simplicity, the loneliness of Adone’s existence, made it open to impressions, and absorbed by them, as busy and changeful lives never are; it was like the heather plants around them, it would not bear transplanting; its birthplace would be its tomb.