rrier to her curiosity. She was not conscious
that she said a syllable which could have affected his reputation, yet
her neighbors all went away from her with the idea that there was
something wrong in the presbytery, and that if she had chosen, the
priest's housekeeper could have told some very strange tales.

Since the days of the miller's murder, a vague feeling against Don
Gesualdo had been growing up in Marca. A man who does not cackle and
scream and roar till he is hoarse at the slightest thing which happens
is always unnatural and suspicious in the eyes of an Italian community.
The people of Marca began to remember that he had some foreign blood in
him, and that he had always been more friendly with the wife of Tasso
Tassilo than was meet in one of his calling.

Falko Melegari had been denied admittance to her by the authorities.
They were not sure that he, as her lover, had not some complicity in the
crime committed; and, moreover, his impetuous and inconsiderate language
to the judge of instruction at the preliminary investigation had been so
fierce and so unwise that it had prejudiced against him all the officers
of the law. This exclusion of him heightened the misery he felt, and
moved him also to a querulous impatience with the vicar of San Bartolo
for being allowed to see her.

"Those black snakes slip and slide in anywhere," he thought, savagely,
and his contempt for and dislike of ecclesiastics, which the manner and
character of Gesualdo had held in abeyance, revived in its pristine
force.

In Easter-time Gesualdo was always greatly fatigued; and when Easter
came round this year, and the sins of Marca were poured into his
ear,--little, sordid, mean sins, of which the narration wearied and
sickened him,--they seemed more loathsome to him than they had ever
done. There was such likeness and such repetition in the confessions of
all of them,--greed, avarice, dishonesty, fornication: the scale never
varied, and the story told kept always at the same low level of petty
and coarse things. Their confessor heard with a tired mind and a sick
heart, and, as he gave them absolution, shuddered at the doubts of the
infallibility of his Church which for the first time passed with dread
terror through his thoughts. The whole world seems to him changing. He
felt as though the solid earth itself were giving way beneath his feet.
His large eyes had a startled and frightened look in them, and his face
grew thinner every