t, and in the port of Leghorn took his passage in an
emigrant-ship then loading there. The green canebrakes and peaceful
millet-fields of Marca saw him no more.

But he had left the burden of his blood-guiltiness behind him, and it
lay on the guiltless soul with the weight of the world.

So long as the man had remained in Marca there had been always a hope
present with Gesualdo that he would persuade him to confess in a court
of justice what he had confessed to the Church, or that some sequence of
accidents would lead up to the discovery of his guilt. But with the
ruffian gone across the seas, lost in that utter darkness which swallows
up the lives of the poor and obscure when once they have left the hamlet
in which their names mean something to their neighbors, this one hope
was quenched; and Gesualdo in agony reproached himself with not having
prevailed in his struggle for the wretch's soul,--with not having been
eloquent enough, or wise enough, or stern enough, to awe him into
declaration of his ghastly secret to the law.

His failure seemed to him a sign of heaven's wrath against himself.

"How dare I," he thought, "how dare I, feeble and timid and useless as I
am, call myself a servant of God, or attempt to minister to other
souls?"

He had thought, like an imbecile, as he told himself, to be able to
awaken the conscience and compel the public confession of this man, and
the possibility of flight had never presented itself to his mind,
natural and simple as had been such a course to a creature without
remorse, continually haunted by personal fears of punishment. He, he
alone on earth, knew the man's guilt; he, he alone, had the power to
save Generosa, and could not use the power because the secrecy of his
holy office was fastened on him like an iron padlock on his lips.

The days passed him like nightmares; he did his duties mechanically,
scarcely consciously; the frightful alternative which was set before him
seemed to parch up the very springs of life itself. He knew that he must
look strange in the eyes of the people; his voice sounded strangely in
his own ears; he began to feel that he was unworthy to administer the
blessed bread to the living, to give the last unction to the dying: he
knew that he was not at fault, and yet he felt that he was accursed.
Choose what he would, he must commit some hateful sin.

The day appointed for the trial came: it was the 10th of May. A hot day,
with the bees booming am