"Don't go," he said to Mara, when Don Alfonso called her to come and dance with the rest. "Don't go, Mara."
He uttered not another intelligible word while he stayed with the sheep that he was shearing. Mara shrugged her shoulders, and went to dance. She was blushing with delight, and her two black eyes shone like two stars, and she smiled so that there was a gleam of white teeth, and all the gold ornaments tossed and scintillated on her wrists and on her bosom, so that she seemed like the Madonna herself.
Jeli had arisen to his full height, with the long shears in his hand, and white in face, as white as once he had seen his father, the cowherd, when he was trembling with fever in front of the fire in the hovel.
Suddenly, when he saw how Don Alfonso, with his curling beard and his velvet coat, and the gold chain at his waistcoat, took Mara by the hand to dance--then--only at that moment that he touched her did he fling himself on him and cut his throat with one stroke, as if he had been a goat.
Later, while they were leading him off to the judge, bound, wholly unmanned, without daring to make the least resistance,--
"How," said he, "should I not have killed him. He robbed me of my Mara!"
[Illustration: "LOLA USED TO GO OUT ON THE BALCONY WITH HER HANDS CROSSED."]
Turiddu Macca, _gnà_ Nunzia's son, after returning from the army, used every Sunday to strut like a peacock through the square in his bersegliere uniform and red cap, looking like the fortune-teller as he sets up his stand with his cage of canaries. The girls on their way to Mass gave stolen glances at him from behind their mantellinas, and the urchins buzzed round him like flies.
He had brought back with him, also, a pipe with the king on horseback carved so naturally that it seemed actually alive, and he scratched his matches on the seat of his trousers, lifting his leg as if he were going to give a kick.
But in spite of all this, Lola, the daughter of _massaro_ Angelo, had not shown herself either at Mass or on the balcony, for the reason that she was going to wed a man from Licodia, a carter who had four Sortino mules in his stable.
At first, when Turiddu heard about it, _santo diavolone!_ he threatened to disembowel him, threatened to kill him--that fellow from Licodia! But he did nothing of the sort; he contented himself with going under the fair one's window, and singing all the spiteful songs he knew.