The sun suddenly dipped behind the heavy bank of clouds and the mountains
darkened. Although it lies in the very centre of the Mediterranean,
Corsica is a gloomy land, and the summits of her high mountains are more
often covered than clear. It is a land of silence and brooding quiet. The
women are seldom gay; the men, in their heavy clothes of dark corduroy,
have little to say for themselves. Some of them were standing now in the
shadow of the great trees, smoking their pipes in silence, and looking
with a studied indifference at nothing. Each was prepared to swear before
a jury at the Bastia assizes that he knew nothing of the "accident," as
it is here called, to Pietro Andrei, and had not seen him crawl up to
Olmeta to die. Indeed, Pietro Andrei's death seemed to be nobody's
business, though we are told that not so much as a sparrow may fall
unheeded.

The Abbe Susini was coming now--a little fiery man, with the walk of one
who was slightly bow-legged, though his cassock naturally concealed this
defect. He was small and not too broad, with a narrow face and clean,
straight features--something of the Spaniard, something of the Greek,
nothing Italian, nothing French. In a word, this was a Corsican, which is
to say that he was different from any other European race, and would, as
sure as there is corn in Egypt, be overbearing, masterful, impossible. He
was, of course, clean shaven, as brown as old oak, with little flashing
black eyes. His cassock was a good one, and his hat, though dusty,
shapely and new. But his whole bearing threw, as it were, into the
observer's face the suggestion that the habit does not make the priest.

He came forward without undue haste, and displayed little surprise and no
horror.