"What do you sell?" he said, flatly and rather spitefully. "What goods?"
"I don't sell anything," replied I, laughing to think he took us for some sort of strolling quacks or commercial travellers.
"Cloth—or something," he said cajolingly, slyly, as if to worm my secret out of me.
"But nothing at all. Nothing at all," said I. "We have come to Sardinia to see the peasant costumes—" I thought that might sound satisfactory.
"Ah, the costumes!" he said, evidently thinking I was a deep one. And he turned bandying words with his dark-browed mate, who was still poking the meat at the embers and crouching on the hearth. The room was almost quite dark. The mate answered him back, and tried to seem witty too. But the girovago was the commanding personality! rather too much so: too impudent for the q-b, though rather after my own secret heart. The mate was one of those handsome, passive, stupid men.
"Him!" said the girovago, turning suddenly to me and pointing at the mate. "He's my wife."
"Yes. He's my wife, because we're always together."
There had become a sudden dead silence in the background. In spite of it the mate looked up under his black lashes and said, with a half smile:
"Don't talk, or I shall give thee a good bacio to-night."