"God keep you from the she-wolf, and from your heart's deep desire!"  
[144]
 
My mother's words kept on ringing in my ears after I had left her. Suddenly the haze was gone and I saw clearly—and I knew that my heart's deep desire was to have Magali for my very own. And with that sudden coming of clear sight I knew, too, that I could have her. Out of the past came a crowd of memories which proved it to me. In my dull way, I say, I had fancied that I loved Magali as a sister, and I had tried to keep that fancy always by me in my haze. But with the haze gone—swept away by my mother's words as the mistral sweeps away our Mediterranean fogs—I knew that Magali never had been the fool that I had been.
 
I remembered her looks and her ways with me from the very day when she came to us, when she was just turned of sixteen: how she used sometimes to lay her hand lightly on my shoulder, how she would bend over to look at the net that I was mending until her hair brushed against my cheek or my forehead, how she always was bringing things to show me that I could not see rightly unless she stood very close at my side, and most of all how a dozen times a day she would be flashing at me her great black eyes. And I remembered how moody[145] and how strange in her ways she was just before Jan got his promise from her; and how, when she told me that her promise was given, she gave me a look like none that ever I had from her, and said slowly: "The fisherman who will not catch any fish at all because he cannot catch the fish he wants most—is a fool, Marius!"
 
Yet even then I did not understand; though, as I say, my eyes were opened a little and I had the feeling that Jan had got between me and the sun. That feeling grew stronger because of the way that she treated him and treated me. Jan was for hurrying the marriage, but she kept him dangling and always was putting him off. As for me, I got all sides of her moods and tempers. Sometimes she scarcely would speak to me. Sometimes she would give me looks from those big black eyes of hers that thrilled me through! Sometimes she would hang about me in a patient sad way that made me think of a dog begging for food. And the colour so went out of her face that her big black eyes looked bigger and blacker still.
 
Then it was that I began to find in the haze that was abo............