"Gaspare, you are the most birbante boy in Sicily!" he said. "You are like a Mago Africano."
"Signorino, you should trust me," returned the boy, sullenly.
His own words seemed to move him, as if their sound revealed to him the whole of the injury that had been inflicted upon his amour propre, and suddenly angry tears started into his eyes.
"I thought I was a servant of confidence" (un servitore di confidenza), he added, bitterly.
Maurice was amazed at the depth of feeling thus abruptly shown to him. This was the first time he had been permitted to look for a moment deep down into that strange volcano, a young and passionate Sicilian heart. As he looked, swift and short as was his glance, his amazement died away. Narcissus saw himself in the stream. Maurice saw, or believed he saw, his heart's image, trembling perhaps and indistinct, far down in the passion of Gaspare. So could he have been with a padrone had fate made his situation in life a different one. So could he have felt had something been concealed from him.
Maurice said nothing in reply. Maddalena was there. They walked in silence to the cottage door, and there, rather like a detected school-boy, he bade her good-bye, and set out through the trees with Gaspare.
"That's not the way, is it?" Maurice said, presently, as the boy turned to the left.
"How did you come, signore?"
"I!"
He hesitated. Then he saw the uselessness of striving to keep up a master's pose with this servant of the sea and of the hills.