“It is the thought of marriage,” said the woman of the people to herself.  “She pines and grows pale now, because she is thinking that she must leave her father’s house so soon, and she is afraid to go among strangers.  But she will be happy by and by, like the swallows in spring.”

Nella remembered how frightened she herself had been when she was betrothed to her departed Vito, and she was thereby much comforted as to Marietta’s condition.  But she said nothing, after Marietta had coldly repelled her first attempt to talk of the marriage, though she forgave her mistress’s frigid order to be silent, telling herself that no right-minded young girl could possibly be natural and sweet tempered under the circumstances.  She was more than compensated for what might have seemed harshness, by something that looked very much like a concession.  Marietta had not gone back to the laboratory since the discovery of the new glass, and a week had passed since then.

Nella went every other day and did all that was necessary for Zorzi’s recovery.  Each time she came he asked her about Marietta, in a rather formal tone, as was becoming when he spoke of his master’s daughter, but hoping that Nella might have some message to deliver, and he was more and more disappointed as he realised that Marietta did not mean to send him any.  She had gone away on that morning with a sort of intimation that she would come back every day, but Nella did not so much as hint that she ever meant to come back at all.

Zorzi went about on crutches, swinging his helpless foot as he walked, for it still hurt him when he put it to the ground.  He was pale and thin, both from pain and from living shut up almost all day in the close atmosphere of the laboratory.  For a change, he began to come out into the little garden, sometimes walking up and down on his crutches for a few minutes, and then sitting down to rest on the bench under the plane-tree, where Marietta had so often sat.  Pasquale came and talked with him sometimes, but Zorzi never went to the porter’s lodge.

He felt that if he got as far as that he should inevitably open the door and look up at Marietta’s window, and he would not do it, for he was hurt by her apparent indifference, after having allowed him to hold her hand in his.  She had not even asked through Nella what had become of the beautiful glass.  What he pretended to say to himself was that it would be very wrong to go and stand outside the glass-house, where the porter would certainly see him, and where he might be seen by any one else, staring at the window of his master’s daughter’s room on the other side of the canal.  But what he really felt was that Marietta had treated him capriciously and that if he had a particle of self-respect he must show her that he did not care.  For if Marietta was very like other carefully brought up girls of her age, Zorzi was nothing more than a boy where love was concerned, and like many boys who have struggled for existence in a more or less corrupt world, he had heard much more of the faithlessness and caprices of women in general than of the sensitiveness and delicate timidity of innocent young girls.