merity. It was subject of endless comment on the part of
the neutrals, when they gathered around the evergreen oak, that night.

"It is a good thing," they said, "that Barricini's sons are not back
yet, for they are not so patient as the lawyer, and very likely they
would not have let their enemy set his foot on their ground without
making him pay for his bravado."

"Remember what I am telling you, neighbour," said an old man, the
village oracle. "I watched Colomba's face to-day. She had some idea in
her head. I smell powder in the air. Before long, butcher's meat will be
cheap in Pietranera!"

CHAPTER X

Orso had been parted from his father at so early an age that he had
scarcely had time to know him. He had left Pietranera to pursue his
studies at Pisa when he was only fifteen. Thence he had passed into the
military school, and Ghilfuccio, meanwhile, was bearing the Imperial
Eagles all over Europe. On the mainland, Orso only saw his father at
rare intervals, and it was not until 1815 that he found himself in
the regiment he commanded. But the colonel, who was an inflexible
disciplinarian, treated his son just like any other sub-lieutenant--in
other words, with great severity. Orso's memories of him were of two
kinds: He recollected him, at Pietranera, as the father who would trust
him with his sword, and would let him fire off his gun when he came
in from a shooting expedition, or who made him sit down, for the
first time, tiny urchin as he was, at the family dinner-table. Then he
remembered the Colonel della Rebbia who would put him under arrest for
some blunder, and who never called him anything but Lieutenant della
Rebbia.

"Lieutenant della Rebbia, you are not in your right place on parade. You
will be confined to barracks three days."

"Your skirmishers are five yards too far from your main body--five days
in barracks."

"It is five minutes past noon, and you are still in your forage-cap--a
week in barracks."

Only once, at Quatre-Bras, he had said to him, "Well done, Orso! But be
cautious!"

But, after all, these later memories were not connected in his mind with
Pietranera. The sight of the places so familiar to him in his childish
days, of the furniture he had seen used by his mother, to whom he had
been fondly attached, filled his soul with a host of tender and painful
emotions. Then the gloomy future that lay before him, the vague anxiety
he felt about his sister, and, above all other things,