To be sure, I should never in the world have spoken those words aloud; I should even have closed my lips tight to make sure of not uttering them. But I felt them as living things, and they thrilled through me. Now I discovered their prodigious meaning. How could one say such words to some one who was not of one’s family, and whom one hardly knew? No one in the world! What about father—and mother? I dimly perceived the sacrilegious power of love, and while I was leaning over that abyss, Nazzarena, usually so grave, was laughing and showing her teeth.
One of the bronzed men of the troop passed, and stopped before us, scrutinising us. Then suddenly he knocked our two heads together, uttering in his jargon a word or two that I did not understand.
The touch of her cheek burned me, and violently pulling myself free I felt myself reddening to the very roots of my hair. She only laughed the more.
“What did he say?” I stammered, tossed between anger and a totally new emotion.
“Oh, nothing,” said she. “That you were my little lover.”
“I!” I protested. “What an idea!”
I could not consent that it should be possible. The love that one expressed must lose all importance. And what next? That way everything would be over. Surely, for love to be love one must keep it to oneself and it must hurt....
III
THE PLOT
HOW was it that no one noticed, when I returned to the house, that I had suddenly changed and grown? I was almost scandalised at their blindness.
“Well, here you are!” observed my father, who was beginning to be uneasy about my absences.