Clelia Alba snapped with violence the thread she span.  “They have talked you over, sir,” she said curtly.  “When you went away you were with us.”

“With you!” he echoed.  “In heart, in pity, in sympathy, yes; never could I be otherwise.  But were I to see you struck with lightning, should I save you by telling you that lightning did not kill?  I did not know that the enterprise was as mature as I found it to be when I saw the promoters of it in Rome.  But I know now that it has been long in incubation; you must remember that every bend and ordnance maps; every stream, however small, is known to the technical office, and the engineers civil and military.  I abhor the project.  It is to me a desecration, an infamy, a robbery; it will ruin the Valdedera from every point of view; but we can do nothing; this is what I implore you to realise.  We are as helpless as one of your fowls when you cut its throat.  Violence can only hurry your son into the grip of the law.  His rights are morally as plain as yonder snow on those mountains; but because they will buy his rights at what will be publicly estimated as a fair price, the law will not allow him to consider himself injured.  My dear friend, you are a woman of sense and foresight; try to see this thing as it is.”

“I will hear what Adone says, sir,” replied Clelia Alba doggedly.  “If he bids me burn the house, I shall burn it.”

Don Silverio was heart-sick and impatient.  What use was it to argue with such minds as these?  As well might he waste his words on the trunks of the olives, on the oxen in their stalls.

They were wronged.

That the wrong done them was masked under specious pretences, and was protected by all the plate armour of law and government, made the outrage little the worse to them.  The brigand from the hills who used to harry their cattle and pillage their strong-box looked to them a hero, a saint, a Christ, compared to these modern thieves who were environed with all the defences and impunity which the law and the State could give.  When an earth-shock makes the soil under your feet quiver, and gape, and mutter, you feel that unnatural forces are being hurled against you, you feel that you are the mere sport and jest of an unjust deity.  This was what they felt now.

“Nay,” said Clelia Alba, “if the earth opened, and took us, it would be kinder; it would bury us at least under our own rooftree.”

What use was it to speak to such people as these of the right of expropriation granted by parliament, of the authority of a dicastero, and of a prefecture, of the sophistries and arguments of lawyers, of the adjudication of values, of the appraisement of claims?  They were wronged:  and they came of a race and of a soil in which the only fitting redresser of wrong was revenge.

“Mother,” cried Adone, “my father would not have given up his land as meekly as a sheep yields up her life.”