“Surely these are they whom I feared for you to meet when you set out for the sea by the cypresses. Not for what they would do to you”—her look was toward Persilope—“but for what they might bring to all Outliers. But now I am not sure.”
She spoke as much to the company at large as to her husband. The number of them had increased, until I could see the outer ring melting into the twilight of the trees, eyes in formless faces of amazement and alarm. Now at the admission of a difficulty, they all turned toward her with that courtesy of inward attention by which, when one of them would understand more of a matter than lay directly before him, each turned his thought upon the subject gravely for a time, like so many lamps lighted in a room, and turned it off again with no more concern when the matter was resolved. But even as she smiled to acknowledge their help she shook her head.
“No,” she repeated, “I cannot tell.” She turned and looked at me, and I gave her the look back with so deep a wish to have her understand that no trouble should come to them by me, that she must have sensed it, for her look went on by me and stopped at Herman.
“You?” she questioned.
“Tell her,” said Herman, who had not caught all the words, but only the general purport of her speech, “tell her that all we ask is to go to our own homes, unharmed and harming no one.”
Now that was not exactly what I had in mind, for though I would not for worlds have made trouble for the Outliers, I wished nothing so little as being sent away before I had got to know more of them. But before I could frame a speech to that end, Trastevera spoke again more lightly.
“Now that I have seen them, there seems nothing in them but kindness and well-meaning. Indeed it is so unusual a thing that House-Folk should discover us, that I am not sure we ought not to pay them some little respect for it.”
She made me a little whimsical acknowledgment of this sentiment, but before I could think of a reply, some slight shifting of the ringed watchers thrust forward Ravenutzi. I recalled suddenly what I had neglected to state in the midst of Prassade’s explanation, that his finding me was not the first intimation I had had of the presence of Outliers in the neighborhood of Broken Tree. Up to this time I had observed that when the Outliers had their heads together on any matter of immediate concern, it had been Ravenutzi’s habit to keep a little to one side, as though not directly affected. Now as I saw him pushed into the cleared space by the stream side, it stirred dimly in my mind that the circumstance of my first meeting with him, which I had not before mentioned, might mean something. I hardly understood what.
I must have made some motion, some slight betraying glance which the smith detected. While the words were in my throat he looked at me, subtly, somehow encompassingly, as if he had projected his personality forward until it filled satisfyingly all my thought. I no longer thought it worth while to mention where I had first seen Ravenutzi nor what I had found him doing. I was taken with a sudden inexplicable warmth toward him, and a vague wish to afford him a protection for which he had not asked and did not apparently need. Swift as this passage was, I saw that Trastevera had noted it. Something dimmed in her, as if her mind had lain at the crossing of our two glances, Ravenutzi’s and mine, and been taken in the shadow.
“For the disposing of the House-Folk,” she finished evenly, as though this had been in her mind from the first to say, “you had better take counsel to decide whether they shall be given the Cup at once, or be kept to await a sign.”