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Rh fire going," he added, when the priest, having slowly recovered from his amazement, passed into the sitting-room.

The Moro took the iron bellows, a sort of arquebuse barrel, turned one end toward the coals, and blew into the other in so unusual a way as to produce a strident whistle. Then he started on his supper.

What possessed him! At one moment he was devouring his food, at another he would raise his head and remain transfixed, while at another he would walk up and down the kitchen violently knocking the chairs and table. He seemed like an imprisoned wild beast which every now and then raises its fangs from the bone, listens and looks, seizes it again, leaves it, rushes around its cage in a rage and goes back to gnaw.

Meanwhile, Don Rocco was leaning over his paper, wondering still at what he had seen, unable in his unsuspiciousness to draw any inferences, listening to the steps and the noises in the next room with a torpid uneasiness that had about the same resemblance to fear as the intelligence of Don Rocco himself had to understanding. "'You will understand later,'" he repeated to himself. "What am I to understand? That he knows where the money is?" He kept it in a box in his bed-chamber, but there were only two ten-franc pieces, and Don Rocco