“Poor little soul!”

He let her draw him into the great porch of the church and thence into the church itself; it was dark, as it always was, cold as an autumn evening, damp even in the canicular heat.

“No one will hear; tell me!” said the child.

He told her.

“And what are you to do?” she asked, her eyes dilated with horror.

“According to him,” said Adone bitterly, “I am to be meek and helpless as the heifer which goes to the slaughter.  Men must not resist what the law permits.”

Nerina was mute.  To dispute what Don Silverio said was like blasphemy to her; she honoured him with all her soul, but she loved Adone.

She loved the Edera water too; that fair green rippling water, on whose bank she had sat naked under the dock leaves the day the two rams had fought.  That which was threatened was an unholy, wicked, cruel robbery.  Was it indeed necessary to yield to it in submission?

She remembered a saying of Baruffo’s:  “If a man stand up to me I leave him some coins in his pocket, some life in his body; but if he crouch and cringe I stick him in the throat.  He is a craven.”

The doctrine of Baruffo seemed to her the more sound.  It warmed the blood of the little Abruzzo-born maiden to recall it.  In the high mountains and forests the meeker virtues are not greatly honoured.

She stood by Adone’s side, knitting her brows under her auburn curling locks, clenching her hands.

“Is there one who does this evil most of all?” she said at length. “One we could reach?”

“You are a brave child, Nerina!” said Adone, and his words made her proud.  “I fear there is a crowd.  Such men are like locusts; they come in swarms.  But the first man who touches the water—­”

“Shall sup of it and drown!”

The little girl added the words with a fierce joy in her great bright eyes.

“Hush!” said Adone, “and get you homeward, and tell my mother that Don Silverio has returned, and that I will come back to my work in a little while.  Tell her he says there is no hope.”

Nerina obeyed him instantly, her bare feet flying over the stones of the street.  He was left alone in the sombre church, with the great winged angels of stone above his head.

He was grateful for its gloom.  He shrank from the light of the morning.  Every drop of blood in his body, and in his brain, and in his limbs, seemed to him to turn to fire —­ a fire which all the waters of the Edera would never quench.

How could they be accused of rebellion or wrong-doing because they wanted to keep the water running in the channel which it had made for itself in the very beginning of the world?

The Edera was ancient as its neighbours, the Fiumicino which heard the voice of Cæsar, or the Marecchia which was bridged by Augustus; ancient as the fountain of Arethusa, as the lake of Diana Nemorensis.  What sacrilege could be more heinous than to chase it from its chosen course?  No Lucumon of Etruria, or Esarch of Ravenna, or Pope or Rome, had ever dared to touch it.  Revolutionists! they, who only sought to preserve it?  The revolutionists were those who with alien hands and vampire’s greed would seek to disturb its peace.