rta shrinks back
frightened and this awakens Pedro's suspicions.

He too has seen the light, but Marta succeeds in quieting him for the
moment, as the light has disappeared.

Slowly a change is coming over Marta. As she perceives, that Pedro is
quite ignorant of her {510} true position, her heart goes out to him,
but she gives no sign of the love, that has taken possession of her.
She resolves to stay all night in this outer hall and sinks down near
the hearth, while Pedro stretches himself on the floor at her feet and
soon falls asleep.--

The second act still finds them in the same position. Marta, seeing
Pedro asleep, gets up quietly in the early dawn, to attend to her
household cares.

When she is out of the hall or kitchen, Nuri comes in and awakes Pedro.
The poor lad's suspicions return and are intensified tenfold by Nuri's
remarks about the village people, who laugh at and pity the young
husband, and she wonders, what the reason of this can be.

Marta, finding the two together, drives the girl away. Her love for
Pedro is awakened and with it jealousy. But Pedro, without looking at
his young wife, takes Nuri by the hand and leads her away.

Old Tommaso, who now comes in, reproaches Marta for her evil life.
With bitter tears she tells him her whole story. How she lived in
Barcelona with her mother, a beggar, having never known her
father;--how her mother died after years of misery, and how the old
lame man, who lived with them, took her abroad, and made her dance and
beg for him.

Having one day reached this village, the pretty girl of thirteen
pleased the rich landowner Sebastiano, and he made her his mistress,
after giving her old {511} foster-father this mill by way of
renumeration for his connivance.--She was often about to drown herself,
but her courage failed her, and so her life was passed in misery until
the day of this marriage, into which she was forced by her master.

Tommaso advises her, to confess everything to her husband, and to ask
his forgiveness.

In the next scene the village girls come to visit the young couple;
they drive Pedro almost mad with their taunts and innuendos, telling
him to ask Marta about their meaning.

When they are gone and Marta brings him the soup for his breakfast, he
refuses to touch it, and abruptly tells her, that he is going back to
the mountains alone.

Full of despair Marta defiantly owns, that she has belonged to another,
and recklessly goads him to