“Who knows what kind of man he is?”
“Gardana?”
“Gardana.”
“Not a very big man, but large enough to terrify one, with a black beard—oh, so black!—and, when you least expect it, there he is on your road, just as though he had sprung out of the ground. Didn’t our Toli once meet him!”
“How was that?”
The spinning-wheel stopped suddenly. A swarm of gnats came in through the windows, and buzzed round in the warmth of the sun; and Lena said quietly:
“It was on his way from the sheepfold; he came upon Gardana on the Padea-Murgu.”
“Oh, it might have been somebody else.”
“It was he, he himself, with that beard, those garments——”
And so the conversation continued. Toli, the shepherd, took no part in the talk. He sat over on the floor, silent, impassive—like a moss-grown stone. Only occasionally he raised his bushy eyebrows, and a troubled, misty look shone in his eyes. Tega’s wife wondered to herself, she could not understand him; really, what was the matter with him? He was brave, she knew he had not his equal for courage, when he had charge of the herd not an animal was ever lost; all the same, what a man he was, always frowning, and never a smile on his lips! There must be something with him, naturally it must be—— And breaking off her train of thought she suddenly spoke to him.