savagely. "Perhaps
he is a murderer as well!"

He knew that the idea was a kind of madness. Gesualdo had never been
known to hurt a fly; indeed, his aversion even to see pain inflicted had
made him often the laughing-stock of the children of Marca when he had
rescued birds or locusts or frogs from their tormenting fingers, and
forbidden them to throw stones at the lambs or kids they drove to
pasture. "They are not baptized," the children had often said, with a
grin; and Gesualdo had as often answered, "The good God baptized them
himself."

It was utter madness to suppose that such a man, tender as a woman,
timid as a sheep, gentle as a spaniel, could possibly have stabbed Tasso
Tassilo to the death within a few roods of his own church, almost on
holy ground itself. And yet the idea grew and grew in the mind of
Generosa's lover until it acquired all the force of an actual
conviction. We welcome no supposition so eagerly as one which accords
with and intensifies our own prejudices. He neglected his duties and
occupations to brood over this one suspicion and put together all the
trifles which he could remember in confirmation of it. It haunted him
wherever he was,--at wine-fair, at horse-market, at cattle-sale, in the
corn-field, among the vines, surrounded by his peasantry at noonday, or
alone in the wild deserted garden of the villa by moonlight.

In his pain and fury, it was a solace to him to turn his hatred on to
some living creature. As he sat alone and thought over all which had
passed (as he did think of it night and day always), many a trifle rose
to his mind which seemed to him to confirm his wild and vague suspicions
of the vicar of San Bartolo. Himself a free-thinker, it appeared natural
to suspect any kind of crime in a member of the priesthood. The Italian
sceptic is as narrow and as arrogant in his free-thought as the Italian
believer in his bigotry. Melegari was a good-hearted young man, and kind
and gay and generous by nature; but he had the prejudices of his time
and of his school. These prejudices made him ready to believe that a
priest was always fit food at heart for the galleys or the scaffold,--a
mass of concealed iniquity covered by his cloth.

"I believe you know more of it than any one," he said, roughly, one day
when he passed the priest on a narrow field-path, while his eyes flashed
suspiciously over the downcast face of Gesualdo, who shrank a little, as
if he had received a blow, and was si