When the people of a remote place are smitten by a public power the blow falls on them as unintelligible in its meaning, as invisible in its agency, as a thunderbolt is to the cattle whom it slays in their stalls.  Even Don Silverio, with his classic culture and his archæological learning, had little comprehension of the means and methods by which these enterprises were combined and carried out; the world of commerce and speculation is as aloof from the scholar and the recluse as the rings of Saturn or the sun of Aldebaran.  Its mechanism, its intentions, its combinations, its manners of action, its ways of expenditure, its intrigues with banks and governments:  all these, to men who dwell in rural solitudes, aloof from the babble of crowds, are utterly unknown; the very language of the Bourses has no more meaning to them than the jar of wheels or roar of steam.

He stood and looked with a sinking heart on the quiet, moonlit country, and the winding course of the water where it flowed, now silvery in the light, now black in the gloom, passing rapidly through the heather and the sallows under the gigantic masses of the Etruscan walls.  It seemed to him to the full as terrible as to Adone; but it did not seem to him so utterly impossible, because he knew more of the ways of men and of their unhesitating and immeasurable cruelty whenever their greed was excited.  If the fury of speculation saw desirable prey in the rape of the Edera then the Edera was doomed, like the daughter of Ædipus or the daughter of Jephtha.

Adone had gone across the bridge, but he had remained by the waterside.

“Pray and sleep!” Don Silverio had said in his last words.  But to Adone it seemed that neither prayer nor sleep would ever come to him again so long as this impending evil hung over him and the water of Edera.

He spent the first part of that summer night wandering aimlessly up and down his own bank, blind to the beauty of the moonlight, deaf to the songs of the nightingales, his mind filled with one thought.  An hour after midnight he went home and let himself into the silent house by a small door which opened at the back, and which he used on such rare occasions as he stayed out late.  He struck a match and went up to his room, and threw himself, dressed, upon his bed.  His mother was listening for his return, but she did not call to him.  She knew he was a man now, and must be left to his own will.

“What ails Adone that he is not home?” had asked old Gianna.  Clelia Alba had been herself perturbed by his absence at that hour, but she had answered:—­

“What he likes to tell, he tells.  Prying questions make false tongues.  I have never questioned him since he was breeched.”

“There are not many women like you,” had said Gianna, partly in admiration, half in impatience.

“Adone is a boy for you and me,” had replied his mother.  “But for himself and for all others he is a man.  We must remember it.”