Note: Translator Pauline Bancroft Flach died in 1966, less than 70 years ago. Therefore, this work is protected by copyright, restricting your legal rights to reproduce it. However, you are welcome to view it on screen, as you do now. Read more about copyright.
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THE HOME-COMING
351
When she comes back, Gaetano has risen. He
offers her his hand; he wishes to go.
Donna Micaela puts out her hand almost without
knowing what she is doing. But then she draws it
b^ck; “ No, no,” she says.
He wishes to go, and who knows whether he will
come again on the morrow. She has not been able
to talk to him; she has not been able to say a word
to him of all that she wished to say.
Surely there was no need for them to be like
ordinary lovers. That man had given her life all its
life for many years. Whether he spoke to her of
love or not was of no importance; yet she wishes to
tell him what he has been to her.
And now, just now. One has to make the most
of one’s opportunities when Gaetano is in question.
She dares not let him go.
“ You must not go yet,” she says. “ I have
something to say to you.”
She draws forward a chair for him; she herself
places herself a little behind him. His eyes are too
gay to-night, they trouble her.
Then she begins to speak. She lays before him
the great, hidden treasures of her life. They were
all the words he had said to her and all the dreams
he had set her to dreaming. She had not lost one.
She had collected and saved them up. They had
been the only richness in her poor life.
In the beginning she speaks fast, as if repeating
a lesson. She is afraid of him; she does not know
whether he likes her to speak. At last she dares to
look at him. He is serious now, no longer
malicious. He sits still and listens as if he would not
lose a syllable. Just now his face was sickly and
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