“And did you meet any one in the wood as you came through?” I remember asking, my thoughts returning to the Ward. “Only Mancha.” 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.” “And what would come in through the River Wall if you did?” said she; but Mancha would not talk of that. “Do you know,” he said, “what the years of my life are to me, the years I have gone mateless? They are the stops in a pipe that plays a tune to my need of her. I hear them piping behind me and my blood runs to the music.” “It shall play you a ten years’ measure yet,” she answered him, “before it pipes you your desire.” “Not ten moons,” he insisted. “Then,” said she, “it will pipe death to you and to your honor.” He hid his face in his hands at that, groaned and bit upon his fingers. At last: “I thought I should have had sympathy from you who have loved so well,” he said. She could not deny him the comfort he so sorely needed on that point, but neither could she let him go without advising him what confusion must come of his persistence in his unhappy passion. He heard her, sliding his great hammer from hand to hand as though it were the argument balancing this way and that in his mind. “True, true,” he would admit; “it is all true that you say.” And more quietly, as she went on with an ingenuity of entreaty and explication: “You are right, Trastevera, you are always right;” and at last: “I thank you for this, Trastevera; now I see what I must do.” He stood up, putting her aside, for she had got down on the ground attempting to stay the rocking of his hammer as she would have stopped the wavering of his mind. He stretched himself under the redwood and rapped so loudly with his weapon on the trunk that the squirrels and nuthatches in the upper stories came out to see, and wood bees droned discontentedly within. “It is true that she may not be loved during the time of her Wardship,” said he; “there must be an end to that, or worse will come of it.” “And you will end it, Mancha, for your honor’s sake?”