hered features,
flushed and hot with restless jealous pains, was at once absurd and
loathsome to her. Youth has no pity for such woes of age, and she often
mocked him openly and cruelly to his face. Still, she knew that she did
him wrong, and her conscience had been more stirred by the reproof of
Gesualdo than she had acknowledged. She was in that wavering mood when a
woman may be saved from an unwise course by change, travel, movement,
and the distractions of the world; but there were none of these for the
miller's young wife. So long as her husband lived, so long would she be
doomed to live here, with the roar of the mill-wheels and the foaming of
the weir-water on her ear, and before her eyes the same thickets of
cane, the same fields with their maples and vines, the same white, dusty
road winding away beyond the poplars, and with nothing to distract her
thoughts or lull her mind away from its idolatry of her fair-haired
lover at the old gray palace on the hill above her home.

She had spent the whole night gazing at the place where he lived. He was
not even there at that moment: he had gone away for two days to a
grain-fair in the town of Vendramino, but she recalled with ecstasy
their meetings by the side of the low green river, their hours in the
wild flowering gardens of the palace, the lovely evenings when she had
stolen out to see him come through the maize and canes, the fire-flies
all alight about his footsteps. Sleepless but languid, weary and yet
restless, she had thrown herself on her bed without taking off her
clothes, and in the dark, as the bells for the first mass had rung over
the shadowy fields. She had for the first time fallen into a heavy
sleep, haunted by dreams of her lover, which made her stretch her arms
to him in the empty air, and murmur, sleeping, wild and tender words.

She had been still on her bed, when the men of the mill had roused her,
beating at the chamber door and crying to her,--

"Generosa, Generosa, Padrona! get up! The master is murdered, and lying
dead at the church!"

She had been lying dreaming of Falko, and feeling in memory his kisses
on her mouth, when those screams had come through the stillness of the
early daybreak, through the music of the blackbirds piping in the
cherry-boughs outside her windows.

She had sprung from off her bed.

She had huddled on some decenter clothing, and, bursting through the
detaining hands of the henchmen and neighbors, had fled, as fa