stel-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.'

He wanted Maria's voice to lull the anguish caused him by _the other_;
to animate for him the image of _the other_.

'Do you smell that?' she exclaimed, as she poured the boiling water on
to the aromatic leaves.

A delicious fragrance diffused itself through the air with the steam.

'How I love that!' she cried.

Andrea shivered. Were not those the very words--and spoken in her very
tone--that Elena had used on the evening she offered him her love? He
fixed his eyes on Maria's mouth.

'Say that again.'

'What?'

'What you just said.'

'Why?'

'The words sound so sweet when you pronounce them--you cannot understand
it, of course. Say them again.'

She smiled, divining nothing, and a little troubled, even a little shy,
under her lover's strange gaze.

'Well then--I love that!'

'And me?'

'What?'

'And me?----you----'

She looked down puzzled at her lover writhing at her feet, his face
haggard and drawn, waiting for the words he was trying to draw out of
her.

'And me?----'

'Ah! you----I love you----'

'That is it! That is it!--Say it again--again----'

She did so, quite unsuspecting. He felt a spasm of inexpressible
pleasure.

'Why do you shut your eyes?' she asked, not because of any suspicion in
her mind, but to lead him on to explain his emotion.

'So that I may die.'

He laid his head on her knee and remained for some minutes in that
attitude, silent and abstracted. She gently stroked his hair, his
brow--that brow behind which his infamous imagination was working.
Sha