say. It will not
be enough for her judges to acquit her; that will not prove her
innocence to all the people here, or to my people at home in my own
country."

He rose and pushed his heavy chair away impatiently: he was ashamed of
his own words, but in the most impetuous Italian natures prudence and
self-love are always the strongest instincts. Gesualdo looked at him
with a great scorn in the depths of his dark, deep, luminous eyes. This
handsome and virile lover seemed to him a very poor creature, a coward
and faithless.

"In the depths of your soul you doubt her yourself!" he said, with
severity and contempt, as he turned away from the writing-table and went
out through the windows into the garden beyond.

"No, as God lives, I do not doubt her," cried Falko Melegari. "Not for
an hour, not for a moment. But to make others believe,--that is more
difficult. I will maintain her and befriend her always if they set her
free; but marry her,--take her to my people,--have every one say that my
wife had been in jail on suspicion of murder,--that I could not do: no
man would do it who had a reputation to lose. One loves for love's sake,
but one marries for the world's."

He spoke to empty air: there was no one to hear him but the little green
lizards who had slid out of their holes in the stone under the
window-step. Gesualdo had gone across the rough grass of the garden, and
had passed out of sight beyond the tall hedge of rose-laurel.

The young man resumed his writing, but he was restless and uneasy, and
could not continue his calculations of debit and audit of loss and
profit. He took his gun, whistled his dog, and went up towards the
hills, where hares were to be found in the heather and snipes under the
gorse. His temper was ruffled, and his mind in great irritation against
his late companion: he felt angrily that he must have appeared a
poltroon and a poor and unmanly lover in the eyes of the churchman. Yet
he had only spoken, he felt sure, as any other man would have done in
his place.

In the sympathy of their common affliction, his heart had warmed for a
while to Gesualdo, as to the only one who like himself cared for the
fate of Tasso Tassilo's wife; but now that suspicion had entered into
him, there returned with it all his detestation of the Church and all
the secular hatred which the gentle character of the priest of Marca had
for a time lulled in him.

"Of course he is a liar and a hypocrite," he thought