She was seized with the feeling of terror she had already experienced on so many occasions. Across her pious spirit there flashed once more the thought of punishment.

Nevertheless, the recollection that her lover awaited her, thrilled her to the heart's core; at the thought of his kisses, his caresses, his mad endearments, her blood was on fire and her soul grew faint. The thrill of pa.s.sion triumphed over the fear of G.o.d. She turned her steps towards her lover's house with all the palpitating emotion of her first rendezvous.

'At last!' cried Andrea, gathering her into his arms, and drinking the breath from her panting lips.

He took one of her hands and held it against his breast.

'Feel my heart. If you had stayed away a minute longer, it would have broken.'

But instead of her hand, she laid her cheek upon it. He kissed the white nape of her neck.

'Do you hear it beat?'

'Yes, and it speaks to me.'

'What does it tell you?'

'That you do not love me.'

'What does it tell you?' repeated the young man, biting her neck softly and preventing her from raising her head.

She laughed.

'That you love me.'

She removed her cloak, her hat and her gloves, and then went to smell the bouquets of white lilac that filled the high Florentine vases like those of the _tondo_ in the Borghese Gallery. Her step on the carpet was extraordinarily light, and nothing could exceed her grace of att.i.tude as she buried her face in the delicate ta.s.sels of bloom.

She bit off the end of a spray, and holding it between her lips--

'Take it,' she said.

They exchanged a long, long kiss in among the perfume.

He drew her closer and said with a tremor in his voice, 'Come.'

'No, Andrea--no; let us stay here. I will make the tea for you.'

She took her lover's hand and twined her fingers into his. 'I don't know what is the matter with me. My heart is so full of love that I could almost cry.'

The words trembled on her lips; her eyes were full of tears.

'Oh, if only I need not leave you, if I could stay here always!'

Her heart was so full that it lent an indefinable sadness to her words.

'When I think that you can never know the whole extent of my love! That I can never know yours! Do you love me? Tell me, say it a hundred, a thousand times--always--you love me?'

'As if you did not know!'

'No, I do not know.'

She uttered the words in so low a tone that Andrea hardly caught them.

'Maria!'

She silently laid her head on Andrea's breast, waiting for him to speak, as if listening to his heart.

He regarded that hapless head, weighed down by the burden of a sad foreboding; he felt the light pressure of that n.o.ble, mournful brow upon his breast, which was hardened by falsehood, encased in duplicity as in a cuira.s.s of steel. He was stirred by genuine emotion; a sense of human pity for this most human suffering gripped him by the throat. And yet this agitation of soul resolved itself into lying words and lent a quiver of seeming sincerity to his voice.

'You do not know!--Your voice was so low that it died away upon your lips; at the bottom of your heart something protested against your words; all, all the memories of our love rose up and protested against them. Oh! _you do not know_ that I love you!--'

She remained leaning against him, listening, trembling, recognising or fancying that she recognised in his moving voice the accents of true pa.s.sion, the accents that intoxicated her and that she supposed were inimitable. And he went on speaking, almost in her ear, in the silence of the room, with his hot breath on her cheek and with pauses that were almost sweeter than words. '--To have one sole thought, continually, every hour, every moment--not to be able to conceive of any happiness but the transcendent one that beams upon me from your mere presence--to live throughout the day in the antic.i.p.ation--impatient, restless, fierce--of the moment when I shall see you again, and, after you have gone to caress and cherish your image in my heart,----to believe in you alone, to swear by you alone, in you alone to put my faith, my strength, my pride, my whole world, all that I dream and all that I hope----'

She lifted her face all bathed in tears. He ceased to speak, and with his lips arrested the course of the warm drops that flowed over her cheeks. She wept and smiled, caressing his hair with trembling hands, shaken with irrepressible sobs.

'My heart, my dearest heart!'

He made her sit down and knelt before her without ceasing to kiss her lids. Suddenly he started. He had felt her long lashes tremble on his lips like the flutter of an airy wing. Time was, when Elena had laughingly given him that caress twenty times in succession. Maria had learned it from him, and at that caress he had often managed to conjure up the image of _the other_.

His start made Maria smile; and as a tear still lingered on her lashes--'This one too,' she said.

He kissed it away, and she laughed softly without a thought of suspicion.

Her tears had ceased, and, rea.s.sured, she turned almost gay and full of charming graces.

'I am going to make the tea now,' she said.

'No, stay where you are.' The image of Elena had suddenly interposed between them.

'No, let me get up,' begged Maria, disengaging herself from his constraining arms. 'I want you to taste my tea. The aroma will penetrate to your very soul.'

She was alluding to some costly tea she had received from Calcutta which she had given to Andrea the day before.

She rose and went over to the arm-chair with the dragons in which the melting shades of the _rosa di gruogo_ of the ancient dalmatic continued to languish exquisitely. The little cups of fine Castel-Durante Majolica still glittered on the tea-table.

While preparing the tea, she said a thousand charming things, she let all the goodness and tenderness of her fond heart bloom out with entire freedom; she took an ingenuous delight in this dear and secret intimacy, the hushed calm of the room with all its accessories of refined luxury.

Behind her, as behind the Virgin in Botticelli's _tondo_, rose the tall vases crowned with sprays of white lilac, and her archangelic hands moved about among the little mythological pictures of Luzio Dolci and the hexameters of Ovid beneath them.

'What are you thinking about?' she asked Andrea, who was sitting on the floor beside her, leaning his head against the arm of her chair.

'I am listening to you. Go on!'

'I have nothing more to say.'

'Yes, you have. Tell me a thousand, thousand things----'

'What sort of things?'

'The things that you alone know how to say.'