For my part, I was not so sure either of Mancha’s inarticulateness or of Zirriloë’s unconsciousness.
I have times now of believing that the girl had observed him, and contrived ways to keep our attention turned on the possible chance of his passion coming to a head. Though I cannot now name any single circumstance that points the suspicion, except as I came finally to believe her capable of any duplicity! I remember how Lianth attached himself to Mancha with what seemed then the natural devotion of youth to a hero. Now this appears as a subtle movement of jealousy, to bring himself more to attention by keeping in conspicuous company.
The girl herself had a trick lately of turning her head; little fluttering, nesting movements as she sat, pretty pursing of the lips, as of a woman knowing herself adored. She had a way, when left to herself, of letting her work fall in her lap, lips a little apart and dreaming eyes. There was a soft flutter of her young breast like a dove’s; a woman owned adorable.
There was more, though it never came to the point where I was justified in speaking of it. Once in the clear interval between the rains, I walked beside the tributary rill that watered the meadow of Deep Fern and saw the Ward sitting close against a bank clothed thick with laurel and azaleas, an impenetrable screen. She had been helping Noche and one of the women strip willows for fish-weirs. The two keepers were down by the streamside, steeping the white wands and turning them in the water in full sight of her and scarcely out of earshot. Whatever Noche and the woman might have been saying was cut off by the frothy gurgle of the creek. They said it to one another without so much as an over-shoulder glance at Zirriloë. Yet there she sat by the laurel bank, listening.
Plainly she listened; with her head turned a little aside, the lips curling and the lids half drawn on the luminous dark eyes. A woman beguiled if ever there was one! Behind her the laurel swayed slightly though there was no wind. It swayed and showed the light underside of leaves, and then was still as I came walking by the waterside and Noche called to me.
I had to walk some distance down the creek to the stepping-stones and across them toward the laurel bank. Before I had gone very far on that trail I met Ravenutzi returning by it. I had no sooner caught sight of him than there flashed up in him that suffusing spark of personality, so excluding of all other considerations that it gave to our casual meeting the appearance of a thing done for its own sake. That was why I did not go on to discern to what or whom Zirriloë had listened, but I found myself turning in the trail to walk back with him, quite as if, as his manner assumed, I had come out on it expressly to meet him. He began to tell me at once, as if that were the object of his excursion, that he had not found some herbs on the high bank that Evarra had sent him for, and that he thought they could hardly be out of the ground yet.
“And did you meet any one in the wood as you came through?” I remember asking, my thoughts returning to the Ward.
“Only Mancha.”
He gave me an odd, quick, sidelong look as he spoke, and began to talk of other things, as if he had seen more than that and did not mean to tell. Whether he had kept the same inviolacy with Trastevera, or she herself had seen something, the very next day she sought out the Hammerer, sitting on the burl of redwood, nursing his hammer between his knees, and taxed him with his passion for the Ward and its unworthiness.
He admitted the fact but not that it discredited him. He would not remind Trastevera that she had been excused from part of the obligation of her Wardship, but he said: