“Oh, I!” he exclaimed, with false _bonhommie_; “I am the man who waits. _Vice versâ_ in waiting will come old age and death. So I shall pass to my ancestors with a beautiful and ridiculous epitaph: that of having loved Donna Maria Guasco uselessly.”
“It is even a big something to be able to love,” she remarked thoughtfully.
“That is what they say in novels and dramas; in life it is rather boring. Above everything the man who loves alone is the greatest bore of all. Good-night, Donna Maria.”
“Good-night,” she said, without detaining him.
An uncertain, melancholy, bitter dream settled on Maria’s soul.
Her husband had entered without her noticing his step. He sat on the seat which Provana had left. It seemed to Maria that his face had become grave and thoughtful. She put down her book, and leaned her head, as if it were too heavy for her, on her beautiful hands. In the harmony of her movements, her womanly grace and fascination, in the silence of the moment, had something penetrating about it.
“I met him near here, but he didn’t see me. What fine tales has he been telling you?” he resumed, with a disingenuous accent.
“However, you must have listened to him with interest.”
“What makes you think that?” she said, trembling.
“I suppose it. The conversation has not been short, nor have you cut it short,” he added a little bitterly.
“Ah!” she exclaimed; “ought I to show the door to your Provana?”
“Mine? Mine? Isn’t he your friend?” he interrupted with agitation.
“No,” she replied precisely, “he is not my friend.”
“He makes love to you, however,” observed Emilio.
The tone was intended to appear indifferent, but if Maria had listened carefully and had regarded her husband’s face better, she would have understood that it was a question, and asked with anxiety. Instead, she shrugged her shoulders, and let it go without a reply. He repeated it.
“Yes, perhaps; I believe so,” she murmured, letting her reply fall indifferently.
“He has always made love to you, hasn’t he?”
“Yes, he seems to have always done so,” she replied, with the same indifference and distraction.
“And you?” he said, in a sharp, hard voice which hurt her. Was he really Emilio who was questioning her so haughtily like a judge? Up to then the conversation had seemed to Maria one of those usual monotonous conversations in which every one speaks and thinks quite differently to what he says, and the lips pronounce empty words mechanically. Instead, she was suddenly aware that her husband wished imperiously to know the truth of her heart.