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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TWO SONGS • 125
did not wish anything earthly to come and drag her
down from that blessed rapture.
But when she met Gaetano on the street he
hardly looked at her; and when she met him at
Donna Elisa’s he did not take her hand and did not
speak to her at all.
For the truth was that, although Gaetano had
come home because it had been too hard to go
without Donna Micaela, he did not wish to tempt or to
persuade her. He saw that she was under the
protection of the saints, and she had become so sacred
to him that he scarcely dared to dream of her.
He wished to be near her, not in order to love
her, but because he believed that her life would
blossom with holy deeds. Gaetano longed for
miracles, as a gardener longs for the first rose in the
spring.
But when weeks went by and Gaetano never tried
to approach Donna Micaela, she began to doubt,
and to think that he had never loved her. She said
to herself that he had won the promise from her to
flee with him only in order to show her that the
Madonna could work a miracle.
If that were true, she did not know why he had
not continued his journey without turning back.
That caused her anxiety. She thought that she
could conquer her love better if she knew whether
Gaetano loved her. She weighed the pros and cons,
and she was more and more sure that he had never
loved her.
While Donna Micaela was thinking of this, she
had to sit and keep Don Ferrante company. He
had lain sick a long time. He had had two strokes
of paralysis, and had risen from his sick-bed a
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