Trastevera was afraid that the Ward, quick, for all her simple seeming, to observe her effect upon men, would become aware of Mancha’s love for her and kindle her imagination at the vanity of this conquest. Any girl might well have been touched by the love of a man worth so much as men are accounted worth. Ravenutzi knew, and managed to make his knowledge seem to grow out of his wish to relieve the perturbation of Trastevera, of whom he was always considerately observant.
There was a quick sympathy of instinct between those two dark ones, and he served her with that fatal appeal to women, of sweetness struggling with some baser attribute, toward her good opinion. He had the air when in her presence, and under her approbation, of having climbed into it out of some native unworthiness.
It was an air calculated to make any woman generous in the bestowal of her company. By degrees Trastevera fell into the way of letting him serve her by interposing a screen between Zirriloë and the Hammerer’s too unguarded gaze. Often in the still noons when Mancha’s adoring mind burned through all the drowsy silences, he would make a diversion, singing or relating one of his long tales.
For my part, I was not so sure either of Mancha’s inarticulateness or of Zirriloë’s unconsciousness.
I have times now of believing that the girl had observed him, and contrived ways to keep our attention turned on the possible chance of his passion coming to a head. Though I cannot now name any single circumstance that points the suspicion, except as I came finally to believe her capable of any duplicity! I remember how Lianth attached himself to Mancha with what seemed then the natural devotion of youth to a hero. Now this appears as a subtle movement of jealousy, to bring himself more to attention by keeping in conspicuous company.
The girl herself had a trick lately of turning her head; little fluttering, nesting movements as she sat, pretty pursing of the lips, as of a woman knowing herself adored. She had a way, when left to herself, of letting her work fall in her lap, lips a little apart and dreaming eyes. There was a soft flutter of her young breast like a dove’s; a woman owned adorable.
There was more, though it never came to the point where I was justified in speaking of it. Once in the clear interval between the rains, I walked beside the tributary rill that watered the meadow of Deep Fern and saw the Ward sitting close against a bank clothed thick with laurel and azaleas, an impenetrable screen. She had been helping Noche and one of the women strip willows for fish-weirs. The two keepers were down by the streamside, steeping the white wands and turning them in the water in full sight of her and scarcely out of earshot. Whatever Noche and the woman might have been saying was cut off by the frothy gurgle of the creek. They said it to one another without so much as an over-shoulder glance at Zirriloë. Yet there she sat by the laurel bank, _listening_.