Odo glanced from one to the other.  “She’s dead, then?” he cried.

Filomena opened deprecating palms.  “Can one tell, excellency?  It may be she is off with the gypsies.”

“The gypsies?  How long since?”

“Giannozzo,” cried his mother, as he stood glowering, “go see that the stable is locked and his excellency’s horses bedded down.”  He slunk out and she began to gather up the remains of Odo’s meagre supper.

“But you must remember when this happened.”

“Holy Mother!  It was the year we had frost in April and lost our hatching for want of leaves.  But as for that child of ingratitude, one day she was here, the next she was gone—­clean gone, as a nut drops from the tree—­and I that had given the blood of my veins to nourish her!  Since then, God is my witness, we have had nothing but misfortune.  The next year it was the weevils in the wheat; and so it goes.”

Odo was silent, seeing it was vain to press her.  He fancied that the girl must have died—­of neglect perhaps, or ill usage—­and that they feared to own it.  His heart swelled, but not against them:  they seemed to him no more accountable than cowed hunger-driven animals.

He tossed impatiently on the hard bed Filomena had made up for him in the bailiff’s parlour, and was afoot again with the first light.  Stepping out into the farm-yard he looked abroad over the flat grey face of the land.  Around the keep stretched the new-ploughed fields and the pollarded mulberry orchards; but these, with the clustered hovels of the village, formed a mere islet in the surrounding waste of marsh and woodland.  The scene symbolised fitly enough of social conditions of the country:  the over-crowded peasantry huddled on their scant patches of arable ground, while miles of barren land represented the feudal rights that hemmed them in on every side.

Odo walked across the yard to the chapel.  On the threshold he stumbled over a heap of mulberry-shoots and a broken plough-share.  Twilight held the place; but as he stood there the frescoes started out in the slant of the sunrise like dead faces floating to the surface of a river.  Dead faces, yes:  plaintive spectres of his childish fears and longings, lost in the harsh daylight of experience.  He had forgotten the very dreams they stood for:  Lethe flowed between and only one voice reached across the torrent.  It was that of Saint Francis, lover of the poor...

The morning was hot as Odo drove toward Pianura, and limping ahead of him in the midday glare he presently saw the figure of a hump-backed man in a decent black dress and three-cornered hat.  There was something familiar in the man’s gait, and in the shape of his large head, poised on narrow stooping shoulders, and as the carriage drew abreast of him, Odo, leaning from the window, cried out, “Brutus—­this must be Brutus!”

“Your excellency has the advantage of me,” said the hunchback, turning on him a thin face lit by the keen eyes that had once searched his childish soul.