urned and walked away, Alessandro still
standing as if rooted to the spot, gazing into the palm of his hand,
Benito and Baba slowly walking away from him unnoticed; at last he
seemed to rouse himself as from a trance, and picking up the horses'
reins, came slowly toward her. Again she started to meet him; again
he made the same authoritative gesture to her to return; and again she
seated herself, trembling in every nerve of her body. Ramona was now
sometimes afraid of Alessandro. When these fierce glooms seized him,
she dreaded, she knew not what. He seemed no more the Alessandro she had
loved.

Deliberately, lingeringly, he unharnessed the horses and put them in
the corral. Then still more deliberately, lingeringly, he walked to the
house; walked, without speaking, past Ramona, into the door. A lurid
spot on each cheek showed burning red through the bronze of his skin.
His eyes glittered. In silence Ramona followed him, and saw him draw
from his pocket a handful of gold-pieces, fling them on the table, and
burst into a laugh more terrible than any weeping,--a laugh which wrung
from her instantly, involuntarily, the cry, "Oh, my Alessandro! my
Alessandro! What is it? Are you mad?"

"No, my sweet Majel," he exclaimed, turning to her, and flinging his
arms round her and the child together, drawing them so close to his
breast that the embrace hurt,--"no, I am not mad; but I think I shall
soon be! What is that gold? The price of this house, Majel, and of the
fields,--of all that was ours in San Pasquale! To-morrow we will go out
into the world again. I will see if I can find a place the Americans do
not want!"

It did not take many words to tell the story. Alessandro had not been
ploughing more than an hour, when, hearing a strange sound, he looked
up and saw a man unloading lumber a few rods off'. Alessandro stopped
midway in the furrow and watched him. The man also watched Alessandro.
Presently he came toward him, and said roughly, "Look here! Be off, will
you? This is my land. I'm going to build a house here."

Alessandro had replied, "This was my land yesterday. How comes it yours
to-day?"

Something in the wording of this answer, or something in Alessandro's
tone and bearing, smote the man's conscience, or heart, or what stood
to him in the place of conscience and heart, and he said: "Come, now, my
good fellow, you look like a reasonable kind of a fellow; you just clear
out, will you, and not make me any trouble.