“It is delicious!” said the professor.

Between the immense cold sky and the damp shadows of the plain the last glimpses of light were softly dying away on the grayish hill, on the red vines, all at rest.  The air was warm and still.

“Is all this yours?” asked the professor.

Don Rocco, perhaps through humility, perhaps through apprehension of what the immediate future might bring, kept silence.

“Make up your mind to stay here, my son,” continued he.  “I know very well, believe me, there is not another place as fortunate as this in the whole diocese.”

“Well, as for me!...” began Don Rocco.

Professor Marin stopped.

“By the way!” said he, “Countess Carlotta has spoken to me.  Look here, Don Rocco!  I really hope that you will not be foolish!”

Don Rocco gazed savagely at his feet.

“Goodness!” continued the professor.  “Sometimes the countess is impossible, but this time, my dear son, she is right.  You know that I speak frankly.  You are the only one here who does not know these things.  It is a scandal, my son!  The whole village cries out against it.”

“I have never heard, I have not...” mumbled Don Rocco.

“Now I tell you of it myself! and the countess has told you more than once.”

“You know what I answered her last night?”

“They were absurd things that you said to her.”

At this blow Don Rocco shook himself a little, and with his eyes still lowered spoke up eagerly in his own defence.

“I answered according to my convictions, and now I cannot change.”

He was humble-hearted, but here was a question of justice and truth.  To speak according to truth, according to what one believes to be the truth, is a duty; therefore, why did they persecute him?

“You cannot change?” said the professor, bending over him and fixing on his face two squinting eyes.  “You cannot change?”

Don Rocco kept silent.

The professor straightened up and started on his walk again.

“Very well,” he said, with ostentatious quiet.  “You are at liberty to do so.”

He suddenly turned to Don Rocco, who was following him with heavy steps.

“Gracious!” he exclaimed with annoyance, “do you really think that you have in your house a regular saint?  Do you take no account of the gossip, of the scandal?  To go against the whole country, to go against those who give you your living, to go against your own good, against Providence, for that creature?  Really, if I did not know you, my dear Don Rocco, I would not know what to think.”

Don Rocco squirmed, winking furiously, as if he were fighting against secret anguish, and breathless, as if words were trying to break forth involuntarily.

“I cannot change; it is just that,” said he when he got through his grimaces.  “I cannot.”

“But why, in the name of heaven?”