"I don't want you to go. Do not go."
"I hear them calling me."
He uttered not another intelligible word while he stayed with the sheep that he was shearing. Mara shrugged her shoulders, and went to dance. She was blushing with delight, and her two black eyes shone like two stars, and she smiled so that there was a gleam of white teeth, and all the gold ornaments tossed and scintillated on her wrists and on her bosom, so that she seemed like the Madonna herself.
Jeli had arisen to his full height, with the long shears in his hand, and white in face, as white as once he had seen his father, the cowherd, when he was trembling with fever in front of the fire in the hovel.
Suddenly, when he saw how Don Alfonso, with his curling beard and his velvet coat, and the gold chain at his waistcoat, took Mara by the hand to dance—then—only at that moment that he touched her did he fling himself on him and cut his throat with one stroke, as if he had been a goat.
Later, while they were leading him off to the judge, bound, wholly unmanned, without daring to make the least resistance,—
"How," said he, "should I not have killed him. He robbed me of my Mara!"
RUSTIC CHIVALRY.
(Cavalleria Rusticana.)