"Do you see how I am left?" asked Jeli, but the girl drew back so frightened that he could not induce her to step inside the house where the dead man had been.
Jeli went to receive the money due his father, and then he started off with his drove for Passanitello, where the grass was already tall on the fallow-land, and the fodder was abundant; therefore, the colts remained there for some time in pasture.
Meantime Jeli had been growing into a big lad, and Mara also must be grown tall, he often thought to himself, while he played on his zufalo; and when he returned to Tebidi after some little time, slowly driving forward the mares through the dangerous paths of "Uncle Cosimo's Fountain," he scanned the little bridge down in the valley, and the hovel in the Valle del Jacitano, and the roof of "the Hall" where the pigeons were always flying.
But at that time the padrone had dismissed massaro Agrippino, and all Mara's family were just on the point of moving away.
Jeli found the girl, who had grown tall and very pretty, standing at the entrance of the yard watching the furniture and things, which they were loading on the cart. The empty room seemed to him more gloomy and smoky than ever before. The table, the commode and the images of the Virgin and of Saint John, and even the nails for hanging up the gourds for seed had left on the walls the marks where they had been for so many years.
"We are going away," said Mara, when she saw him looking around. "We are going down to Marineo, where the great house stands in the plain."
Jeli took hold and helped massaro Agrippino and la gnà Lia load up the cart, and when there was nothing else to carry out of the room he went and sat down with Mara on the edge of the watering-trough.
"Even houses," he remarked, when he saw the last hamper piled on, "even houses, when anything is taken away from them, do not any longer seem the same."
"At Marineo," replied Mara, "we shall have much better rooms, mamma says, and large as the cheese house."
"Now that you are going away, I shall not want to come here any more; it seems to me as if winter had come back—to see that door closed."