it and not cultivate it, we will let the terraces fall away after the
rains, we will live miserably on the finest soil in Europe--we may
starve, but we won't sell."

Gilbert did not seem to be listening very intently. He was watching the
young bamboos now bursting into their feathery new green, as they waved
to and fro against the blue sky. His head was slightly inclined to one
side, his eyes were contemplative.

"It is a pity," he said, after a pause, "that Andrei did not have a
better knowledge of the insular character. He need not have been in
Olmeta churchyard now."

"It is a pity," rapped out Perucca, with an emphatic stick on the wooden
floor, "that Andrei was so gentle with them. He drove the cattle off the
land. I should have driven them into my own sheds, and told the owners to
come and take them. He was too easy-going, too mild in his manners. Look
at me--they don't send me their threatening letters. You do not find any
crosses chalked on my door--eh?"

And indeed, as he stood there, with his square shoulders, his erect
bearing and fiery, dark eyes, Mattei Perucca seemed worthy of the name of
his untamed ancestors, and was not a man to be trifled with.

"Eh--what?" he asked of the servant who had approached timorously,
bearing a letter on a tray. "For me? Something about Andrei, from those
fools of gendarmes, no doubt."

And he tore open the envelope which Colonel Gilbert had handed to the
peasant a couple of hours earlier in the Lancone Defile. He fixed his