"You mean... that is possible?"
"It is more than possible. It is certain. These things always end so. My poor dear friend! do you not understand, even yet, that nothing can save your homestead?"
Clelia Alba leaned her elbows on her knees and bowed her face upon her hands. She felt as women of her race had felt on some fair morn when they had seen the skies redden with baleful fires, and the glitter of steel corslets shine under the foliage, and had heard the ripe corn crackle under the horses' hoofs, and had heard the shrieking children scream, "The lances are coming, mother! Mother! save us!"
Those women had had no power to save homestead or child; they had seen the pikes twist in the curling locks, and the daggers thrust in the white young throats, and the flames soar to heaven, burning rooftree and clearing stackyard, and they had possessed no power to stay the steel or quench the torch. She was like them.
She lifted her face up to the light.
"He will kill them."
"He may kill one man — two men — he will have blood on his hands. What will that serve? I have told you again and again. This thing is inevitable — frightful, but inevitable, like war. In war do not millions of innocent and helpless creatures suffer through no fault of their own, no cause of their own, on account of some king's caprice or statesman's blunder? You are just such victims here. Nothing will preserve to you the Terra Vergine. My dear old friend, have courage."
"I cannot believe it, sir; I cannot credit it. The land is ours; this little bit of the good and solid earth is ours; God will not let us be robbed of it."
"My friend! no miracles are wrought now. I have told you again and again and again you must lose this place."
"I will not believe it!"