ut that had been impossible. He must see her, hear her! He
lived for her alone. Study? Impossible! Play, with his friends? They had
all become obnoxious to him! His house was a cave, a cellar, a place to
eat in and sleep in. He left it the moment he got out of bed, and kept
away from the city, too, which seemed stuffy, oppressive, like a jail to
him. Off to the fields; to the orchards, to the Blue House where she
lived! He would wait and wait for afternoon to come--the time when, by a
tacit arrangement neither of them had proposed, he might enter her
orchard and find her on the bench under the four dead palms!... Well, he
could not go on living that way. Poor folks envied him his power,
because he was a deputy, at twenty-five! And yet his one purpose in life
was to be ... well, she could guess what ... that garden bench, for
instance, gently, deliciously burdened with her weight for whole
afternoons; or that needlework which played about in her soft fingers;
or one of her servants, Beppa, perhaps, who could waken her in the
morning, bend low over her sleeping head, and smooth the loose tresses
spread like rivulets of gold over the white pillow. A slave, an animal,
a thing even, provided it should be in continuous contact with her
person--that was what he longed to be; not to find himself obliged, at
nightfall, to leave her after a parting absurdly prolonged by childish
pretexts, and return to his irritating, common, vulgar life at home, to
the solitude of his room, where he imagined he could see a pair of green
eyes staring at him from every dark corner, tempting him.

Leonora was not laughing. Her gold-spotted eyes had opened wide; her
nostrils were quivering with emotion. She seemed deeply moved by the
young man's eloquent sincerity.

"Poor Rafael! My poor dear boy!... And what are we going to do?"

Down at the Blue House, Rafael had never dared speak so openly. The
presence of Leonora's servants; the nonchalant, mocking air with which
she welcomed him at the door; the irony with which she met his every
hint at a declaration had always crushed, humiliated him. But there, on
the open highway, it was different somehow. He felt free. He would empty
his whole heart out.

What anguish! Every day he went to the Blue House trembling with hope,
enthralled in his dream of love! "Perhaps it will be today," he would
say to himself each time. And his legs would give way at the knees, and
he would choke as he swallowed! Then, h