lent. He had spoken on an
unconsidered impulse, and would have been unable to say what his own
meaning really was; but, as he saw the embarrassment and observed the
silence of his companion, what he had uttered at hazard seemed to him
curiously confirmed and strengthened.

"If you know anything which could save her and you do not speak," he
said, passionately, "may all the devils you believe in torture you
through all eternity!"

Gesualdo still kept silent. He made the sign of the cross nervously, and
went on his way.

"Curse all these priests!" said the young man, bitterly, looking after
him. "If one could only deal with them as one does with other men!--but
in their vileness and their feebleness they are covered by their frock
like women."

He was beside himself with rage and misery and the chafing sense of his
own impotence; he was young and strong and ardently enamoured, and yet
he could do no more to save the woman he loved from eternal separation
from him than if he had been an idiot or an infant, than if he had had
no heart in his breast and no blood in his veins.

Whenever he met the vicar afterwards he did not even touch his hat, and
ceased those outward observances of respect to the Church which he had
always given before to please his master, who liked such example to be
set by the steward to the peasantry.

"If Ser Baldo send me away for it, so he must do," he thought. "I will
never set foot in the church again. I should choke that accursed parocco
with his own wafer."

For suspicion is a poisonous weed which, if left to grow unchecked, soon
reaches maturity, and Falko Melegari soon persuaded himself that his own
suspicion was a truth, which only lacked time and testimony to become as
clear to all eyes as it was to his.

CHAPTER IV.

Meantime, Gesualdo was striving with the utmost force that was in him to
persuade the real criminal to confess publicly what he had told under
the seal of confession. He saw the man secretly, and used every argument
with which the doctrines of his Church and his own intense desires could
supply him. But there is no obstinacy so dogged, no egotism so
impenetrable, no shield against persuasion so absolute, as the stolid
ignorance and self-love of a low mind. The Girellone turned a deaf ear
to all censure as to all entreaty: he was stolidly indifferent to all
the woe that he had caused and would cause if he remained silent. What
was all that to him? The thought