"It is strange."

He felt vaguely uneasy that any had come near the water; as a lover
dislikes the pressure of a crowd about his beloved in a street, so he
disliked the thought of foreign eyes resting on the Edera. That they
should have used his little punt, always left amongst the sedges,
seemed to him a most offensive and unpardonable action.

He went to the spot where the intruders had been seen, but there was
no trace of them, except that the wet sand bore footprints of persons
who had, as she had said of them, worn boots. He followed these
footprints for some mile or more up the edge of the stream, but there
he lost them from sight; they had passed on to the grass of a level
place, and the dry turf, cropped by sheep to its roots, told no
tales. Near this place was a road used by cattle drivers and mules;
it crossed the heather for some thousand yards, then plunged into the
woods, and so went up over the hills to the town of Teramo,
thirty-five kilometres away. It was a narrow, rough, steep road,
wholly unfit for vehicles of any kind more tender than the rude
ox-treggia, slow as a snail, with rounds of a tree-trunk for its
wheels, and seldom used except by country folks.

He would have asked Don Silverio if he had heard or seen anything of
any strangers, but the priest was away that day at one of the lonely
moorland cabins comprised in his parish of Ruscino, where an old man,
who had been a great sinner in his past, was at his last gasp, and
his sons and grandsons and great-grandchildren all left him to meet
his end as he might.