"Why, Mario, what good would it do you to have me for your wife? You do not even know whether you will want to marry when you are old enough."
"Yes, I do, Lauriane! I want nobody else for a wife but you, because you are good, and because you love everybody that I love. And as you say that a woman must love her husband, I know that you will always love me if we are married; but, if you marry someone else, you will never think about loving me. Then I shall be very unhappy, and it makes me want to cry just to think of it."
"And now you are really crying!" said Lauriane, wiping his eyes with her handkerchief. "Come, come, Mario, I tell you that you are ill to-night, and that you must have a good supper and a good night's sleep; for you are worrying about troubles that are still to come, instead of rejoicing over those that you conquered last night."
"What is past is past," said Mario; "what is to come—I don't know why I think so much about it to-day; but I do, and I cannot help it."
"You have been too much wrought up!"
"Perhaps so; but I do not feel tired; and I do not know why I thought of you all through the night, whenever my father and I were in great danger.—'If we should both die,' I said to myself, 'who will save my Lauriane?'—Really, I thought of you as much, perhaps more than of my Mercedes and all the others. And I thought of you more when I met Pilar than at any other time."
"Why did that bad girl make you think of your Lauriane?"
Mario reflected a moment, then replied:
"You see, when I was travelling with the gypsies, I used often to play and talk with that child, who knows Spanish and a little Arabic, and who made me feel sorry for her, because she always seemed sick and unhappy. Mercedes and I were always as kind to her as we could be, and she was fond of us. She called Mercedes mother and me my little husband. And when I said: 'No, I don't want to be,' she would cry and sulk, so that I had to say to comfort her: 'Yes, yes, it is all right!' She did us a service last night, I agree; she went very promptly to give warning to Monsieur Robin and Monsieur Guillaume, as I told her to; but I had a horror of her all the same, because I knew that she was cruel and had no religion. And then that name of husband, which she had often given me against my will, made me sick, and I remembered that you and I had promised in sport to marry each other, and I saw the devil on one side of me, with her features, and my guardian angel on the other side, with yours."
As Mario concluded, a stone from the little cottage fell so near Lauriane that she had a narrow escape from being wounded.