" Regina answered. "When you are tired of me,
you shall send me away. You shall throw me away like an old coat."

"You are always saying that!" returned Marcello, displeased. "You know
very well that I shall never be tired of you. Why do you say it?"

"Because I shall not complain. I shall not cry, and throw myself on my
knees, and say, 'For the love of heaven, take me back!' I am not made
like that. I shall go, without any noise, and what must be will be.
That is all. Because I want nothing of you but love, I shall go when you
have no more love. Why should I ask you for what you have not? That
would be like asking charity of the poor. It would be foolish. But I
shall tell you something else."

"What?" asked Marcello, looking up to her face again, when she had
finished her long speech.

"If any one tries to make me go before you are tired of me, it shall be
an evil day for him. He shall wish that he had not been born into this
world."

"You need not fear," Marcello said. "No one shall come between us."

"Well, I have spoken. It does not matter whether I fear Signor Corbario
or not, but if you like I will tell him what I have told you, when he
comes. In that way he will know."

She spoke quietly, and there was no murderous light in her eyes, nor any
dramatic gesture with the words; but she was a little paler than before,
and there was an odd fixedness in her expression, and Marcello knew that
she was deeply moved, by the way she fell back into her primitive
peasant's speech, not ungrammatical, but oddly rough and forcible
compared with the language of educated society which she had now learned
tolerably well from him.

After that she was silent for a while, and then they talked as usual,
and the day went by as other days had gone.

On the next afternoon Folco Corbario reached Saint Moritz and sent a
note up to Marcello asking him to come down on the following morning.

Regina was left alone for a few hours, and she went out with the idea of
taking a long walk by herself. It would be a relief and almost a
pleasure to walk ten miles in the clear air, breathing the perfume of
the pines and listening to the roar of the torrent. Marcello could not
walk far without being tired, and she never thought of herself when he
was with her; but when she was alone a great longing sometimes came over
her to feel the weight of a conca full of water on her head, to roll up
her sleeves and scrub the floors, to carry burdens and w