ickening suspicions, the haunting, irrepressible doubts, which now
and then came over the mind of her lover as he walked to and fro by the
edge of the river at night, looking up at what had been the casement of
her chamber, did not assail for an instant the stronger faith of
Gesualdo, weak as he was in body and, in some ways, weak in character.

The truth might remain in horrid mystery, in impenetrable darkness,
forever; it would make no difference to him; he would be always
convinced that she had been innocent. Had he not known her when she was
a little, barefooted child, coming flying through the shallow green
pools and the great yellow grasses and the sunny canebrakes of the Bocca
d'Arno?

Most innocent, indeed, had been his relations with the wife of Tassilo,
but to him it seemed that the interest he had taken in her, the pleasure
he had felt in converse with her, had been criminal. There had been
times when his eyes, which should have only seen in her a soul to save,
had become aware of her mere bodily beauty, had dwelt on her with an
awakening of carnal admiration. It sufficed to make him guilty in his
own sight. This agony which he felt for her was the sympathy of a
personal affection. He knew it, and his consciousness of it flung him at
the feet of his crucifix in tortures of conscience.

He knew, too, that he had done her harm by the incoherence and the
reticence of his testimony, by the mere vehemence with which he had
unwisely striven to affirm an innocence which he had no power to
prove,--even by that natural impulse of humanity which had moved him to
bring her husband's corpse under the roof of the church and close the
door upon the clamorous and staring throng who saw in the tragedy but a
pastime. He, more than any other, had helped to cast on her the darkness
of suspicion; he, more than any other, had helped to make earthly peace
and happiness forever denied to her.

Even if they acquitted her in the house of law yonder, she would be
dishonored for life. Even her lover, who loved her with all the hot
coarse ardor of a young man's uncontrolled desires, had declared that he
would be ashamed to walk beside her in broad day so long as this slur of
possible, if unproved, crime were on her. His sensitive soul began to
take alarm lest it were not a kind of sin to be so occupied with the
fate of one to the neglect and detriment of others. Candida saw him
growing thinner and more shadow-like every day, with eve