She lifted her face up to the light.

“He will kill them.”

“He may kill one man —­ two men —­ he will have blood on his hands.  What will that serve?  I have told you again and again.  This thing is inevitable —­ frightful, but inevitable, like war.  In war do not millions of innocent and helpless creatures suffer through no fault of their own, no cause of their own, on account of some king’s caprice or statesman’s blunder?  You are just such victims here.  Nothing will preserve to you the Terra Vergine.  My dear old friend, have courage.”

“I cannot believe it, sir; I cannot credit it.  The land is ours; this little bit of the good and solid earth is ours; God will not let us be robbed of it.”

“My friend! no miracles are wrought now.  I have told you again and again and again you must lose this place.”

“I will not believe it!”

“Alas!  I pray hat you may not be forced to believe; but I know that I pray in vain.  Tell me, you are certain that Adone will not answer that summons?”

“I am certain.”

“He is mad.”

“No, sir he is not mad.  No more than I, his mother.  We have faith in Heaven.”

Don Silverio was silent.  It was not for him to tell them that such faith was a feeble staff.

“I must not tarry,” he said, and rose.  “The night is near at hand.  Tell your son what I have said.  My dear friend, I would almost as soon stab you in the throat as say these things to you; but as you value your son’s sanity and safety make him realise this fact, which you and he deny:  the law will take your home from you, as it will take the river from the province.”

“No, sir!” said Clelia Alba fiercely.  “No, no, no!  There is a God above us!”

Don Silverio bade her sadly farewell, and insisted no more.  He went through the odorous grasslands, where the primrose and wild hyacinth grew so thickly and the olive branches were already laden with small green berries, and his soul was uneasy, seeing how closed is the mind of the peasant to argument or to persuasion.  Often had he seen a poor beetle pushing its ball of dirt up the side of a sandhill only to fall back, and begin again, and again fall; for any truth to endeavour to penetrate the brain of the rustic is as hard as for the beetle to climb the sand.  He was disinclined to seek the discomfiture of another useless argument, but neither could he be content in his conscience to let this matter wholly alone.

Long and dreary as the journey was to San Beda, he undertook it again, saying nothing to any one of his purpose.  He hoped to be able to put Adone’s contumacy in a pardonable light before the Syndic, and perhaps to plea his cause better than the boy could plead it for himself.  To Don Silverio he always seemed a boy still, and therefore excusable in all his violence and extravagances.