At last he came face to face with Lola, on her way back from praying to Our Lady of Peril; and at sight of him she turned neither white nor red, as though he were no concern of hers.
“It is a blessing to have sight of you!” said he.
“Oh, friend Turridu, I was told that you came back around the first of the month.”
“And I too was told many other things besides!” he answered. “So it is true that you are going to marry Alfio the carter?”
“If such is the will of God!” answered Lola, drawing together beneath her chin the two corners of her kerchief.
“You do the will of God by taking or leaving as it pays you best! And it was the will of God that I should come home from so far away to hear such fine news, Mistress Lola!”
The poor fellow still tried to make a show of indifference, but his voice had grown husky; and he walked on ahead of the girl with a swagger that kept the tassel of his cap dancing back and forth upon his shoulders. It really hurt the girl to see him with such a long face, but she had not the heart to deceive him with fair words.
“Listen, friend Turridu,” she said at length, “you must let me go on to join the other girls. What would folks be saying if we were seen together?”
“That is true,” replied Turridu; “now that you are to marry Alfio, who has four mules in his stable, it won’t do to set people talking. My mother, on the other hand, poor woman, had to sell our one bay mule, and that little bit of vineyard down yonder on the high-road, during the time that I was soldiering. The time is gone when the Lady Bertha span; and you no longer give a thought to the time when we used to talk together from window to courtyard, and when you gave me this handkerchief just before I went away, into which God knows how many tears I wept at going so far that the very name of our land seemed forgotten. But now good-by, Mistress Lola, let us square accounts and put an end to our friendship.”
Mistress Lola and the carter were married; and on the following Sunday she showed herself on her balcony, with her hands spread out upon her waist, to show off the big rings of gold that her husband had given her.