"What do you fear?" she heard herself say. The breathless delight of this moment was so intense that she toyed with it, fearing to lose the smallest part. She withheld the confession trembling upon her lips which he was too timid to take for granted, too blind to see.
"Can you take me, in spite of my wretched cowardice back there in Sicily? I would understand, dear, if you couldn't forget it, but—I love you so—I tried so hard to make myself worthy—you'll never know how hard it was—I couldn't do what you asked me, the other day, but, thank God, my hands are clean."
He held them out as if in evidence; then, to his great, his never-ending surprise, she came forward and placed her two palms in his. She stood looking gravely at him, her surrender plain in the curve of her tremulous lip, the droop of her faltering, silk-fringed lids.
Knowledge came to him with a blinding, suffocating suddenness which set his brain to reeling and wrung a rapturous cry from his throat.
After a long time he felt her shudder in his arms.
"What is it, heart of my life?" he whispered, without lifting his lips from her tawny cloud of hair.
"Those walls!" she said. "Those cold, gray walls!"
A sob rose, caught, then changed to a laugh of deep contentment, and she nestled closer.
Children's voices were wafted up to them through the fragrant, peaceful dusk, and the two fell silent again, until Oliveta came and stood beside them with her face transfigured.
"God be praised!" said the peasant girl, as she put her hands in theirs. "Something told me I should not return to Sicily alone."