In this story by Grazia Deledda, a lonely doctor falls in love with young woman who is not only strikingly beautiful, but very wealthy. His attentions are initially ignored, but things change after he provides her forty-three-year-old neighbor with a medical certificate to allow her husband (aged twenty!) to escape military service. She begins to warm towards the doctor, while at the same time pressing him for poison to kill a fox that has been stealing her lambs. The doctor agrees, unaware the fox she plans to kill is the two-legged kind. Themes include infatuation, desire, deception, manipulation, jealousy.