"Poor innocent, he meant well!" thought the steward, as he watched the dark, slender form of the priest pass away through the vines and mulberry-trees. The young man did not greatly venerate the Church himself, though he showed himself at mass and sent flowers for the feast-days because it was the custom to do so. He was like most young Italians who have had a smattering of education, very indifferent on such matters, and inclined to ridicule. He left them for women and old men. But there was something about his visitant which touched him,—a simplicity, an unworldliness, a sincerity, which moved his respect; and he knew in his secret heart that the parocco, as he called him, was right enough in everything that he had said.

Gesualdo himself went on his solitary way, his buckled shoes dragging wearily over the dusty grass of the wayside. He had done no good, and he did not see what good he could do. He felt helpless before the force and speed of an unknown and guilty passion, as he once felt before a forest fire which he had seen in the Marche. All his Church books gave him homilies enough on the sins of the flesh and the temptings of the devil; but none of these helped him before the facts of this lawless and godless love, which seemed to pass high above his head like a whirlwind. He went on slowly and dully along the edge of the river-bed: a sense of something which he had always missed, which he would miss eternally, was with him.

It was now quite night. Gesualdo liked to walk late at night. All things were so peaceful, or at the least seemed so. You did not see the gashes in the lopped trees, the scars in the burned hill-side, the wounds in the mule's loins, the blood-shot eyes of the working ox, the goitred throat of the child rolling in the dust. Night, kindly friend of dreams, cast her soft veil over all woes, and made the very dust seem as a silvered highway to a throne for God.

He went now through the balmy air, the rustling canes, the low-hanging boughs of the fruit-laden peach-trees, and the sheaves of cut corn leaning one up against another under the hives. He followed the course of the water, a shallow thread at this season, glistening under the moon in its bed of shingle and sand. He passed the mill-house perforce on his homeward way, he saw the place of the weir made visible even in the dark by the lanterns which swung on a cord stretched from one bank to another, to entice any such fish as there might still be in the shallows. The mill stood down into the water, a strong place, built in olden days; the great black wheels were perforce at rest; the mules champed and chafed in their stalls, inactive, like the mill; for the next three months there would be nothing to do unless a storm came and brought a freshet from the hills. The miller would have the more leisure to nurse his wrongs, thought Gesualdo; and his heart was troubled: he had never met with these woes of the passions; they oppressed and alarmed him.

As he passed the low mill windows, protected from thieves by their iron gratings, he could see the interior, lighted as it was by the flame of oil lamps, and through the open lattices the voices, raised high in stormy quarrel, seemed to smite the holy stillness of the night like a blow. The figure of Generosa stood out against the light which shone behind her; she was in a paroxysm of rage; her eyes flashed like the lightnings of the hills, and her beautiful arms were tossed above her head in impassioned imprecation. Tasso Tassilo seemed for the moment to crouch beneath this rain of flame-like words; his face, on which the light shone full, was deformed with malignant and impotent fury, with covetous and jealous desire: there was no need to hear her words to know that she was taunting him with her love for Falko Melegari. Gesualdo was a weak man and physically timid; but here he hesitated but one instant. He lifted the latch of the house door and walked straightway into the mill kitchen.

"In the name of Christ, be silent!" he said to them, and made the sign of the cross.

The torrent of words stopped on the lips of the young woman; the miller scowled, and shrank from the light, and was mute.

"Is this how you keep your vows to heaven and to each other?" said Gesualdo.

A flush of shame came over the face of the woman; the man drew his hat farther over his eyes and went out of the kitchen silently. The victory had been easier than their monitor had expected. And yet of what use was it? he thought; they were silent out of respect for him. As soon as the restraint of his presence should be removed they would begin afresh. Unless he could change their souls, it was of little avail to bridle their lips for an hour.

There was a wild chafing hatred on one side and a tyrannical, covetous, dissatisfied love on the other: out of such discordant elements what peace could come?

Gesualdo shut the wooden shutters of the windows, that others should not see, as he had seen, into the interior; then he strove to pacify his old playmate, whose heaving breast, and burning cheeks, and eyes which scorched up in fire their own tears, spoke of a tempest lulled, not spent. He spoke with all the wisdom with which study and the counsels of the Fathers had supplied him, and with what was sweeter and more likely to be efficacious, a true and yearning wish to save her from herself. She was altogether wrong, and he strove to make her see the danger and the error of her ways. But he strove in vain. She had one of those temperaments, reckless, vehement, pleasure-loving, ardent, and profoundly selfish, which see only their own immediate gain, their own immediate desires. When he tried to stir her conscience by speaking of the danger she drew down on the head of the man she professed to love, she almost laughed.

"He would be a poor creature," she said, proudly, "if all danger would not be dear to him for me!"

Gesualdo looked her full in the eyes.

"You know that this matter must end in the death of one man or of the other. Do you mean that this troubles you not one whit?"

"It will not be my fault," said Generosa; and he saw in her the woman's lust of vanity, which finds food for its pride in the blood shed for her, as the tigress does, and even the gentle hind.

He remained an hour or more with her, exhausting every argument which his creed and his sympathy could suggest to him as having any possible force in it to sway this wayward and sin-bound soul; but he knew that his words were poured on her ear as uselessly as water on a stone floor. She was in a manner grateful to him as her friend, in a manner afraid of that vague majesty of some unknown power which he represented to her; but she hated her husband, she adored her lover: he could not stir her from those two extremes of passion. He left her with apprehension and a pained sense of his own impotence. She promised him that she would provoke Tassilo no more that night, and this poor promise was all that he could wring from her. It was late when he left the mill-house. He feared Candida would be alarmed at his unusual absence, and hastened, with trouble on his soul, towards the village, lying white and lonely underneath the midsummer moon. He had so little influence, so slender a power to persuade or warn, to counsel or command; he felt afraid that he was unworthy of his calling.

"I should have been better in the cloister," he thought, sadly: "I have not the key to human hearts."

He went on through a starry world of fire-flies making luminous the still-uncut corn, and, entering his presbytery, crept noiselessly up the stairs to his chamber, thankful that the voice of his housekeeper did not cry to him out of the darkness to know why he had so long tarried. He slept little that night, and was up, as was his wont, by daybreak. It was still dark when the church-bell was clanging above his head for the first office.

It was the day of St. Peter and of St. Paul. Few people came to the early mass,—some peasants who wanted to have the rest of the day clear, some women, thrifty housewives who were up betimes, Candida herself; no others. The lovely morning light streamed in, cool and roseate; there were a few lilies and roses on the altar; some red draperies floated in the door-way; the nightingales in the wild-rose hedge sang all the while, their sweet voices crossing the monotonous Latin recitatives. The mass was just over when into the church from without there arose a strange sound, shrill and yet hoarse, inarticulate and yet uproarious: it came from the throats of many people, all screaming and shouting and talking and swearing together. The peasants and the women who were on their knees scrambled to their feet and rushed to the door, thinking the earth had opened and the houses were falling. Gesualdo came down from the altar and strove to calm them, but they did not heed him, and he followed them despite himself. The whole village seemed out,—man, woman, and child: the nightingales grew dumb under the outcry.

"What is it?" asked Gesualdo.

Several voices shouted back to him, "Tasso Tassilo has been murdered!"

"Ah!"

Gesualdo gave a low cry, and leaned against the stem of a cypress-tree to save himself from falling. What use had been his words that night!

The murdered man had been found lying under the canes on the wayside not a rood from the church. A dog smelling at it had caused the body to be sought out and discovered. He had been dead but a few hours,—apparently killed by a knife thrust under his left shoulder, which had struck straight through the heart.

The agitation in the people was unimaginable, the uproar deafening. Some one with a grain of sense remaining had sent for the carabineers, but their picket was two miles off, and they had not yet arrived. The dead man still lay where he had fallen: every one was afraid to touch him.

"Does his wife know?" said Gesualdo, in a strange, hoarse voice.

"His wife will not grieve," said a man in the crowd, and there was a laugh, subdued by awe and the presence of death and of the priest.

Gesualdo, with a strong shudder of disgust, held up his hand in horror and reproof, then bent over the dead body where it lay among the reeds.

"Bring him to the sacristy," he said to the men nearest him. "He must not lie there, like a beast unclean, by the roadside. Go fetch a hurdle,—a sheet,—anything."

But no one of them would stir.

"If we touch him they will take us up for murdering him," they muttered, as one man.

"Cowards! Stand off: I will carry him in-doors," said the priest.

"You are in full canonicals!" cried Candida, twitching at his sleeve.

But Gesualdo did not heed her. He was brushing off with a tender hand the flies which had begun to buzz about the dead man's mouth. The flies might have stung and eaten him all the day through for what any one of the little crowd would have cared: they would not have stretched a hand even to drag him into the shade.

Gesualdo was a weakly man; he had always fasted long and often, and had never been strong from his birth; but indignation, compassion, and horror for the moment lent him a strength not his own: he stooped down and raised the dead body in his arms, and, staggering under his burden, he bore it the few roods which separated the place where it had fallen from the church and the vicar's house.

The people looked on open-mouthed with wonder and awe. "It is against the law," they muttered, but they did not offer active opposition. Gesualdo, unmolested save for the cries of the old housekeeper, carried his load into his own house and laid it reverently down on the couch which stood in the sacristy. He was exhausted with the great strain and effort; his limbs shook under him, the sweat poured off his face, the white silk and golden embroideries of his cope and stole were stained with the clotted blood which had fallen from the wound in the dead man's breast. He did not heed it, nor did he hear the cries of Candida mourning the disfigured vestments, nor the loud chattering of the crowd thrusting itself into the sacristy. He stood looking down on the poor, dusty, stiffening corpse before him with blind eyes, and thinking, in silent terror, "Is it her work?"

In his own soul he had no doubt.

Candida plucked once more at his robes.

"The vestments! the vestments! You will ruin them! Take them off——"

He put her from him with a gesture of dignity which she had never seen in him, and motioned the throng back towards the open door.

"I will watch with him till the guards come," he said. "Go send his wife hither."

Then he scattered holy water on the dead body, and kneeled down beside it and prayed.

The crowd thought that he acted strangely. Why was he so still and cold, and why did he seem so stunned and stricken? If he had screamed and raved, and run hither and thither purposelessly, and let the corpse lie where it was in the canes, he would have acted naturally in their estimation. They hung about the door-ways half afraid, half angered: some of them went to the mill-house, eager to have the honor of being the first bearer of such news.

No one was sorry for the dead man, except some few who were in his debt and knew that now they would be obliged to pay with heavy interest what they owed up to his successors.

With the grim pathos and dignity which death imparts to the commonest creature, the murdered man lay on the bench of the sacristy, amidst the hubbub and the uproar of the crowding people, he and the priest the only mute creatures in the place.

Gesualdo kneeled by the dead man in his blood-stained, sand-stained canonicals; he was praying with all the soul there was in him, not for the dead man, but for the living woman.

The morning broadened into the warmth of day. He rose from his knees, and bade his sacristan bring linen, and spread it over the corpse to cheat the flies and the gnats of their ghastly repast. No men of law came. The messengers returned. The picket-house had been closed at dawn, and the carabineers were away. There was nothing to be done but to wait. The villagers stood or sat about in the paved court, and in the road under the cypresses. They seldom had such an event as this in the dulness of their lives. They brought hunches of bread and ate as they discoursed of it.

"Will you not break your fast?" said Candida to Gesualdo. "You will not bring him to life by starving yourself."

Gesualdo made a sign of refusal.

His mouth was parched, his throat felt closed; he was straining his eyes for the first sight of Generosa on the white road. If she were guilty she would never come, he thought, to look on the dead man.

Soon he saw her, coming with swift feet and flying skirts and bare head, through the boles of the cypresses. She was livid; her unbound hair was streaming behind her.

She had passed a feverish night, locking her door against her husband, and spending the whole weary hours at the casement where she could see the old gray villa where her lover dwelt, standing out against the moonlight among its ilex- and olive-trees. She had had no sense of the beauty of the night: she had been only concerned by the fret and fever of a first love and of a guilty passion.

She was not callous at heart, though wholly untrained and undisciplined in character, and her conscience told her that she gave a bad return to a man who had honestly and generously adored her, who had been lavish to her poverty out of his riches, and had never been unkind until a natural and justified jealousy had embittered the whole current of his life. She held the offence of infidelity lightly, yet her candor compelled her to feel that she was returning evil for good, and repaying in a base manner an old man's unwise but generous affection. She would have hesitated at nothing that could have united her life to her lover; yet in a corner of her soul she was vaguely conscious that there was a degree of unfairness and baseness in setting their youth and their ardor to hoodwink and betray a feeble and aged creature like Tasso Tassilo. She hated him fiercely: he was her jailer, her tyrant, her keeper. She detested the sound of his slow step, of his croaking voice, of his harsh calls to his men and his horses and mules; the sight of his withered features, flushed and hot with restless jealous pains, was at once absurd and loathsome to her. Youth has no pity for such woes of age, and she often mocked him openly and cruelly to his face. Still, she knew that she did him wrong, and her conscience had been more stirred by the reproof of Gesualdo than she had acknowledged. She was in that wavering mood when a woman may be saved from an unwise course by change, travel, movement, and the distractions of the world; but there were none of these for the miller's young wife. So long as her husband lived, so long would she be doomed to live here, with the roar of the mill-wheels and the foaming of the weir-water on her ear, and before her eyes the same thickets of cane, the same fields with their maples and vines, the same white, dusty road winding away beyond the poplars, and with nothing to distract her thoughts or lull her mind away from its idolatry of her fair-haired lover at the old gray palace on the hill above her home.

She had spent the whole night gazing at the place where he lived. He was not even there at that moment: he had gone away for two days to a grain-fair in the town of VendraminÕ, but she recalled with ecstasy their meetings by the side of the low green river, their hours in the wild flowering gardens of the palace, the lovely evenings when she had stolen out to see him come through the maize and canes, the fire-flies all alight about his footsteps. Sleepless but languid, weary and yet restless, she had thrown herself on her bed without taking off her clothes, and in the dark, as the bells for the first mass had rung over the shadowy fields. She had for the first time fallen into a heavy sleep, haunted by dreams of her lover, which made her stretch her arms to him in the empty air, and murmur, sleeping, wild and tender words.

She had been still on her bed, when the men of the mill had roused her, beating at the chamber door and crying to her,—

"Generosa, Generosa, Padrona! get up! The master is murdered, and lying dead at the church!"

She had been lying dreaming of Falko, and feeling in memory his kisses on her mouth, when those screams had come through the stillness of the early daybreak, through the music of the blackbirds piping in the cherry-boughs outside her windows.

She had sprung from off her bed.

She had huddled on some decenter clothing, and, bursting through the detaining hands of the henchmen and neighbors, had fled, as fast as her trembling limbs could bear her, to the church.

"Is it true? Is it true?" she cried, with white lips, to Gesualdo.

He looked at her with a long, inquiring regard: then, without a word, he drew the linen off the dead face of her husband, and pointed to it.

She, strong as a colt and full of life as a young tree, fell headlong on the stone floor in a dead swoon.

The people gathered about the door-way and watched her suspiciously and without compassion. There was no one there who did not believe her to be the murderess. No one except Gesualdo. In that one moment when he had looked into her eyes he had felt that she was guiltless. He called Candida to her and left her, and closed the door on the curious, cruel, staring eyes of the throng without.

The people murmured: what title had he more than they to command and direct in this matter? The murder was a precious feast to them: why should he defraud them of their rights?

"He knows she is guilty," they muttered, "and he wants to screen her and give her time to recover herself and to arrange what story she shall tell."

Soon there came the sound of horses' feet on the road, and the jingling of chains and scabbards stirred the morning air: the carabineers had arrived. Then came also the syndic and petty officers of the larger village of Sant' Arturo, where the communal municipality in which Marca was enrolled had its seat of justice, its tax-offices, and its schools. There was a great noise and stir, grinding of wheels and shouting of orders, vast clouds of dust and ceaseless din of voices, loud bickerings of conflicting authorities at war with one another, and rabid inquisitiveness and greedy excitement on all sides.

In a later time they remembered against him all this which he did now.

The feast of St. Peter and St. Paul had been a day of disaster and disorder, but to the good people of Marca both these were sweet. They had something to talk of from dawn till dark, and the blacker the tragedy the merrier wagged the tongues. The soul of their vicar alone was sick within him. Since he had seen the astonished, horrified eyes of the woman Generosa he had never once doubted her, but he felt that her guilt must seem clear as the noonday to all others. Her disputes with her husband and her passion for Falko Melegari were facts known to all the village, and who else had any interest in his death? The whole of Marca pronounced as with one voice against her: the women had always hated her for her superior beauty, and the men had always borne her a grudge for her saucy disdain of them, and that way of bearing herself as though a beggar from Bocca d'Arno were a queen.

"Neighbors put up with her pride while she was on the sunny side of the street," said Candida, with grim satisfaction, "but now she is in the shade they'll fling the stones fast enough." And she was ready to fling her own stone. Generosa had always seemed an impudent jade to her, coming and talking with Don Gesualdo, as she did, at all hours, and as though the church and the sacristy were open bazaars!

How that day passed, and how he bore himself through all its functions, he never knew. It was the dead of night, when he, still dressed, and unable even to think calmly, clasping his crucifix in his hands, and pacing to and fro his narrow chamber with restless and uneven steps, heard his name called by the voice of a man in great agitation, and, looking out of his casement, saw Falko Melegari on his gray horse, which was covered with foam and sweating as from a hard gallop.

"Is it true?" he cried, a score of times.

"Yes, it is all true," said Gesualdo. His voice was stern and cold: he could not tell what share this man might not have had in the crime.

"But she is innocent as that bird in the air," screamed her lover, pointing to a scops owl which was sailing above the cypresses.

Gesualdo bowed his head and spread out his hands, palm downward, in a gesture which meant hopeless doubt.

"I went away at dark into the town to buy cattle," said the steward, with sobs in his throat. "I rode out by the opposite road. I knew naught of it. Oh, my God, why was I not here? They should not have taken her without its costing them hard."

"You would have done her no good," said Gesualdo, coldly. "You have done her harm enough already," he added, after a pause. Falko did not resent the words: the tears were falling like rain down his cheeks, his hands were clinched on his saddle-bow, the horse stretched its foam-flecked neck unheeded.

"Who did it? Who could do it? He had many enemies. He was a hard man," he muttered.

Gesualdo gave a gesture of hopeless doubt and ignorance. He looked down on the lover's handsome face and head in the moonlight. There was a strange expression in his own eyes.

"Curse you for a cold-hearted priest," thought the young steward, with bitterness. Then he wheeled his horse sharply round, and, without any other word, rode off towards his home in the glistening white light, to stable his weary horse, and to saddle another to ride into the larger village of Sant' Arturo. It was past midnight; he could do no good; he could see no one; but it was a relief to him to be in movement; he felt that it would choke him to sit and sup and sleep and smoke as usual in his quiet house among the magnolias and the myrtles, whilst the love of his life lay alone in her misery.

All gladness which would at any natural death of Tasso Tassilo's have filled his soul was quenched in the darkness of horror in which her fate was snatched from him and plunged into the mystery and the blackness of imputed crime.

He never actually suspected her for a moment; but he knew that others would no doubt do more than suspect.

"Perhaps the brute killed himself," he thought, "that the blame of the crime might lie on her and part her from me."

Then he knew that such a thought was absurd. Tasso Tassilo had loved his life, loved his mill, and his money, and his petty power, and his possession of his beautiful wife; and, besides, what man could stab himself from behind between the shoulders? It was just the blow that a strong yet timid woman would give. As he walked to and fro on the old terrace whilst they saddled the horse, he felt a sickening shudder run through him. He did not suspect her. No, not for an instant. And yet there was a dim, unutterable horror upon him which veiled the remembered beauty of her face.

The passing of the days which came after this feast of the two apostles was full of an unspeakable horror to him, and in the brief space of them he grew haggard, hollow-cheeked, almost aged, despite his youth. The dread formalities and tyrannies of the law seized on the quiet village and tortured every soul in it: every one who had seen or heard or known aught of the dead man was questioned, tormented, harangued, examined, suspected. Don Gesualdo himself was made subject to a searching and oft-repeated interrogation, and severely reproved that he had not let the body lie untouched until the arrival of the officers of justice. He told the exact truth as far as he knew it, but when questioned as to the relations of the murdered man and his wife he hesitated, prevaricated, contradicted himself, and gave the impression to the judicial authorities that he knew much more against the wife than he would say. What he tried to do was to convey to others his own passionate conviction of the innocence of Generosa; but he utterly failed in doing this; and his very anxiety to defend her only created an additional suspicion against her.

The issue of the preliminary investigation was that the wife of Tasso Tassilo, murdered on the morning of the day of St. Peter and St. Paul, was consigned to prison, to be "detained as a precaution" under the lock and key of the law, circumstantial evidence being held to be strongly against her as the primary cause, if not the actual executant, of the murder of her lord.

Every one called from the village to speak of her spoke against her, with the exception of Falko Melegari, who was known to be her lover, and whose testimony weighed not a straw, and Don Gesualdo himself, a priest, indeed, but the examining judge was no friend of priests, and would not have believed them on their oaths, whilst the strong friendship for her, and the nervous anxiety to shield her, displayed so unwisely though so sincerely by him, did her more harm than good, and made his bias so visible that his declarations were held valueless.

"You know I am innocent!" she cried to him, the day of her arrest; and he answered her, with the tears falling down his cheeks, "I am sure of it! I would die to prove it! For one moment I did doubt you,—pardon me!—but only one. I am sure you are innocent, as I am sure that the sun hangs in the skies."

But his unsupported belief availed nothing to secure that of others: the dominant feeling among the people of Marca was against her, and, in face of that feeling and of the known jealousy of her which had consumed the latter days of the dead man, the authorities deemed that they could do no less than order her provisional arrest. Her very beauty was a weapon turned against her. It seemed so natural to her accusers that so lovely and so young a woman should have desired to rid herself of a husband, old, ill-favored, exacting, and unloved. In vain—utterly in vain—did Falko Melegari, black with rage and beside himself with misery, swear by every saint in the calendar that his relations with her had been hitherto absolutely innocent. No one believed him.

"You are obliged to say that," said the judge, with good-humored impatience.

"But, God in heaven, why not when it is true?" shouted Falko.

"It is always true when the damo is a man of honor?" said the ironical judge, with an incredulous, amused smile.

So, her only defenders utterly discredited, she paid the penalty of being handsomer and grander than her neighbors, and was taken to the town of VendraminÕ, and there left to lie in prison until such time as the majesty of the law should be pleased to decide whether or not it deemed her guilty of causing the death of her husband. The people of Marca were content. They only could not see why the law should take such a time to doubt and puzzle over a fact which to them all was as clear as the weather-vane on their church tower.

"Who should have killed him, if not she or her damo?" they asked, and no one could answer.

So she was taken away by the men of justice, and Marca no more saw her handsome head with the silver pins in its coiled hair leaning out from the square mill windows, or her bright-colored skirts going light as the wind up the brown sides of the hills, and through the yellow-blossomed gorse in the warm autumn air, to some trysting-place under the topmost pines, where the wild pigeons dwelt in the boughs above, and the black stoat ran through the bracken below.

The work of the mill went on the same, being directed by the brother of Tassilo, who had always had a share in it, both of labor and profit. The murder still served for food for people's tongues through vintage and onward until the maize-harvest and the olive-gathering. As the nights grew long and the days cold, it ceased to be the supreme theme of interest in Marca: no one ever dreamed that there could be a doubt of the absent woman's guilt, or said a good word for her; and no one gave her any pity for wasting her youth and fretting her soul out in a prison-cell, though they were disposed to grant that what she had done had been, after all, perhaps only natural, considering all things. Her own family were too poor to travel to her help,—indeed, only heard of her misfortunes after many days, and then only by chance, through a travelling hawker: they could do nothing for her, and did not try; she had never sent them as much of her husband's money as they had expected her to do, and now that she was in trouble she might get out of it as she could, so they said. She had always cared for her ear-rings and breastpins, never for them: she would see if her jewels would help her now. When any member of a poor family marries into riches, the desire to profit by her marriage is, if ungratified, quickly turned into hatred of herself. Why should she have gone to eat stewed kid and fried lamb and hare baked with fennel, when they had only a bit of salt fish and an onion now and then?

They had admitted the vicar of San Bartolo, once or twice, to visit her, the jailer standing by, but he had been unable to do more than to weep with her and assure her of his own perfect belief in her innocence. The change he found in her shocked him so greatly that he could scarcely speak; and he thought to himself, as he saw how aged and wasted and altered she was, if she lose her beauty and grow old before her time, what avail will it be to her even if they declare her innocent? Her gay lover will look at her no more.

Falko Melegari loved her wildly, ardently, vehemently indeed; but Gesualdo, with that acute penetration which sometimes supplies in delicate natures that knowledge of the world which they lack, felt that it was not a love which had any qualities in it to withstand the trials of time or the loss of physical charms. Perchance Generosa herself felt as much; and the cruel consciousness of it hurt her more than her prison-bars.