As he felt now, so, he thought, must feel men who have heard their own death-sentence, and are thrust alone into a cell.

If Don Silverio could do nothing, to whom could he turn?

Could he induce the people to rise?  It would be their ruin as well as his, this rape of the river.  Would they bear it as they bore taxation, neglect, conscription, hunger?

It was not half an hour, although it seemed to him half a day, which passed before Don Silverio came down the stone stair, his little dog running and leaping about him.  He seated himself before Adone, by the shuttered window, through which, by chinks and holes in the wood, there came rays of light and tendrils of vine.

Then detail by detail, with lucidity and brevity, he narrated all he had heard and done in Rome, and which it was exceeding hard to bring home to the comprehension of a mind wholly ignorant of such things.

“When I reached Rome,” he explained, “I was for some days in despair.  The deputy of San Beda was not at the Chamber.  He was in Sicily.  Another deputy, a friend of the Prior at San Beda, to whom I had a letter, was very ill with typhoid fever.  I knew not where to turn.  I could not knock at the doors of strangers without credentials.  Then I remembered that one with whom I had been friends, great friends, when we were both seminarists, had become a great man at the Vaticano.  It was scarcely possible that he, in his great elevation, would recollect one unseen for a quarter of a century.  But I took courage and sent in my name.  Imagine my surprise and emotion when I was admitted at once to his presence, and was received by him with the uttermost kindness.  He assisted me in every way.  He could not of course move ostensibly in a matter of the government, himself, but he gave me letters to those who could obtain me the information and the interviews which I desired.  He was goodness itself, and through him I was even received by his Holiness.  But from all those political and financial people whom I saw I learned but the same thing.  The matter is far advanced, is beyond any alteration.  The company is formed.  The concurrence of parliament is not to be, but has long been, given.  The ministry favours the project.  They all repeated to me the same formula:  public works are to the public interest.  They babbled commonplaces.  They spoke of great advantages to the province.  I pleaded as forcibly as I could in the interests of this valley, and I opposed fact to formula.  But my facts were not those which they wanted; and they told me, politely but unmistakably, that a churchman should not seek to interfere with civil matters.  The promoters are masters of the position.  They are all of accord:  the foreign bankers, the Italian bankers; the foreign engineers, the Italian engineers; the Technical office, the President of Council, the dicastero of Hygiene, of Agriculture, of Public Works, all of them.  Our poor little valley seems to