The day after his return home, he saw a man from Fonni cross the street and he grew deadly pale.
Yes, he was expecting something—something dreadful; the news that she had again disappeared. He understood his cowardice, yet at the same time was ready to execute his threat, "I will follow you, I will kill you, I will kill myself."
Then it seemed to him that nothing was real; at the widow's house was no one but the widow herself, with her legends and her long black phantasmal cloak. Nothing, no one else.
The second night he heard Aunt Tatàna telling her old story to a little boy from a neighbouring house.
"The woman ran—ran—throwing down the nails; and they grew and grew till they filled the whole plain. Uncle Hobgoblin followed her, followed her, but he never could catch her up, because the nails stuck in her feet——"
What anguished pleasure that story had given Anania in his childhood, especially in the first days after his mother's desertion! To-night he dreamed that the man from Fonni had brought news she was gone, that he set out to follow—to follow—across a plain sown with nails. Look! there she is! far on the horizon! Soon he will catch her up and kill her, but he is afraid—afraid—because it is not Olì at all, but a goatherd, that same goatherd who had passed down the street while Aunt Tatàna was with Signor Carboni. Anania runs—runs—the nails don't prick; he wishes they would prick; and Olì has changed into the goatherd and is singing those lines of Lenau's:
| I masnadieri nella Taverna della Landa | Robbers in field-side |
| tavern. |
There! now he has caught her, he is going to kill her, and the frost of death has stiffened his arm—
He woke, bathed in cold perspiration. His heart had stopped; he wept.
The third day. Margherita, surprised that he did not write, invited him to the usual tryst. He went. He told of his excursion up the Gennargentu. He abandoned himself to her caresses, as a tired wayfarer abandons himself on the grass, under the shadow of a tree. But not a word could he utter of the dark secret which was consuming him.