"I have always offered to do so," said Don Silverio.

Adone was again silent, swinging his slender brown feet in the water,
and looking always upward at the evening sky beyond the great round
shape of the dismantled fortress.

He learned some Latin with much difficulty, studying hard in his
evening leisure in the winters, and with time he could decipher for
himself, with assistance from Don Silverio, the annals of the
Tor'alba; and he saw that it was as certain as anything grown over
with the lichens and cobwebs of time can be that he himself was the
last of the race.

"Your father used to say something of the sort," his mother said;
"but he had only heard it piecemeal from old people, and never heard
enough to put the pieces together as you have done. 'What does it
matter either?' he used to say; and he said those great lords had
been cut-throats on the land and robbers on the river. For your
father's father had worn the red shirt in his youth, as I have told
you often, and thought but little of lords and princes."

But Adone was different; the past allured him with the fascination
which it has for poets and scholars; he was neither of these, except
in a vague, unconscious way; but his imagination was strong and
fertile once aroused; the past, as suggested to him by the vicar, by
degrees became to him a living thing and nearer than the present, as
it is to scholars who are poets. He was neither scholar nor poet; but
he loved to muse upon that far-off time when his forefathers had been
lords of the land and of the water.