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.
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:
“Am I worth so little to the Outliers that they would not excuse this girl to be my wife? Ay, I want her,” he confessed; then as his stout-built body thrilled at the thought, threw out his arms, reddening, and laughed shamelessly.
“Do you know the rocking-stone on the top of the ledge by The Gap, that four men can barely stir on its pivot? I could rock it into the river to-day with the strength of my wanting.”