e.

So, her only defenders utterly discredited, she paid the penalty of
being handsomer and grander than her neighbors, and was taken to the
town of Vendramino, and there left to lie in prison until such time as
the majesty of the law should be pleased to decide whether or not it
deemed her guilty of causing the death of her husband. The people of
Marca were content. They only could not see why the law should take such
a time to doubt and puzzle over a fact which to them all was as clear as
the weather-vane on their church tower.

"Who should have killed him, if not she or her _damo_?" they asked, and
no one could answer.

So she was taken away by the men of justice, and Marca no more saw her
handsome head with the silver pins in its coiled hair leaning out from
the square mill windows, or her bright-colored skirts going light as the
wind up the brown sides of the hills, and through the yellow-blossomed
gorse in the warm autumn air, to some trysting-place under the topmost
pines, where the wild pigeons dwelt in the boughs above, and the black
stoat ran through the bracken below.

The work of the mill went on the same, being directed by the brother of
Tassilo, who had always had a share in it, both of labor and profit. The
murder still served for food for people's tongues through vintage and
onward until the maize-harvest and the olive-gathering. As the nights
grew long and the days cold, it ceased to be the supreme theme of
interest in Marca: no one ever dreamed that there could be a doubt of
the absent woman's guilt, or said a good word for her; and no one gave
her any pity for wasting her youth and fretting her soul out in a
prison-cell, though they were disposed to grant that what she had done
had been, after all, perhaps only natural, considering all things. Her
own family were too poor to travel to her help,--indeed, only heard of
her misfortunes after many days, and then only by chance, through a
travelling hawker: they could do nothing for her, and did not try; she
had never sent them as much of her husband's money as they had expected
her to do, and now that she was in trouble she might get out of it as
she could, so they said. She had always cared for her ear-rings and
breastpins, never for them: she would see if her jewels would help her
now. When any member of a poor family marries into riches, the desire to
profit by her marriage is, if ungratified, quickly turned into hatred of
herself. Why should she h