I hung my head to conceal my embarrassment. Not love her any more! The foolish question! When one loved it was for always. The word _always_, which my lips could never have uttered, made a strange music in my heart, so sweet that nothing sweeter could ever be heard in the world. Reassured as to my condition, and no doubt as to the effect she produced upon me, she calmly pulled the halter. Her horse had ceased to drink and from his moist nostrils drops of water were falling back into the basin. IV MY BETRAYAL BECAUSE of that word _always_, continually singing in my heart, the days that followed were at once delicious and bitter, like the fruit that I used to gather too early in the garden. I was sure of the future and indeed of all eternity, enjoying to the full the love that as yet asks for nothing outside of itself. For the slight distress that I had felt at the contact of Nazzarena’s cheek when our heads had been jokingly bumped together had soon passed; nothing indeed was lacking to fill the cup of my happiness but never to see my beloved; my embarrassment returned whenever we met. If at least I had not been obliged to speak to her! I could not have endured to kiss her--I never so much as touched her hand. Each of us--so I think now--perhaps believed in the superiority of the other: she because my house was so solid, and I because of her horse, her golden robe, her talent as a horsewoman, her wandering life, and that indefinable something with which love endowed her. She soon perceived that the two sides were not equal: she could appear in public and be applauded; I was a mere spectator. Conscious of her domination, she no longer shrank from laying commands upon me. She would ask little services of me,--to buy her a thimble in town, or gold thread and needles to mend her fine robe; and to ask for things used by girls and not by boys made me blush in the shop. If I Had to add some complementary explanations, I didn’t know where to turn to hide myself. She made me help her peel potatoes and delighted in my embarrassment when she saw me casting furtive glances toward the open square. “Don’t worry, little man; no one is passing,” she would say, robbing me at a blow of all the benefit of my heroism.