worse than the first.

"Justice!" cried the woman. "There is no justice in Corsica! What had
Pietro done that he should lie there? Only his duty--only that for which
he was paid. He was the Perucca's agent, and because he made the idlers
pay their rent, they threatened him. Because he put up fences, they
raised their guns to him. Because he stopped their thieving and their
lawlessness, they shoot him. He drove their cattle from the fields
because they were Perucca's fields, and he was paid to watch his master's
interests. But Perucca they dare not touch, because his clan is large,
and would hunt the murderer down. If he was caught, the Peruccas would
make sure of the jury--ay! And of the judge at Bastia--but Pietro is not
of Corsica; he has no friends and no clan, so justice is not for him."

She knelt down again as she spoke and laid her hand on her dead husband's
back, but she made no attempt to move him. For although Pietro Andrei was
an Italian, his wife was Corsican--a woman of Bonifacio, that grim town
on a rock so often besieged and never yet taken by a fair fight. She had
been brought up in, as it were, an atmosphere of conventional
lawlessness, and knew that it is well not to touch a dead man till the
gendarmes have seen him, but to send a child or an old woman to the
gendarmerie, and then to stand aloof and know nothing; and feign
stupidity; so that the officials, when they arrive, may find the whole
village at work in the fields or sitting in their homes, while the dead,
who can tell no tales, has suddenly few friends and no enemies.

Then Andrei's widow rose slowly to her feet. Her face was composed now
and set. She arranged the black silk handkerchief on her head, and set
her dress in order. She was suddenly calm and quiet. "But see," she said,
looking round into eyes that failed to meet her own, "in this country