"Speak! speak! I see you know. Where is she? Is she alive? Is she dead? Where is she? Where is she? Where is she?"
He repeated the question twenty times, roaming automatically round the kitchen, turning and returning, stretching the cloth, putting it over his face. He seemed almost mad, angry rather than grieved.
"Hush! hush!" said the old woman going to his side. "I had supposed you knew. Yes—she's alive; but she's not the woman who has deceived you by pretending to be your mother."
"She didn't pretend, Nonna! It was my own fancy. She doesn't even know I thought it! Ah—then it's not she!" he added in a low voice, as much shocked as if till that moment he had been certain of his discovery.
"Go on!" he exclaimed. "Why are you keeping me on the rack? Why have you not alluded to her? Where is she? Where is she?"
"Perhaps she has never left Sardinia," said the widow, walking by his side. "Really I thought you knew and that you didn't think it mattered. I saw her this year, early in May. She came to Fonni for the Feast of the Martyrs, with a singer, a blind man, her lover. They had walked from Neoneli, a long way. She had malaria and was like an old woman of sixty. The blind man took a lot of money at the Feast, and after it was over he joined a company of beggars going to a feast in another part of the country. He left her behind. In June or July I heard she was harvesting in the tancas of Mamojada. The fever was killing her. She was ill a long time in the Cantoniera de su Gramene, and she's there still."
Anania lifted his head and opened his arms with a gesture of despair.
"I—I saw her!" he cried. "I saw her! I saw her! Are you certain of all this?" he asked gazing hard at the old woman.
"Quite certain. Why should I invent it?"
"Tell me," he insisted, "is she really there? I saw a woman with fever—yellow—earthy—with eyes like a cat's. She was at the window. Are you sure it was she? Are you sure?"