The Marchesa d'Ateleta laughed, but the
princess was evidently thoroughly out of temper. The footmen waiting in
the hall called for the carriages as if at the door of a theatre or
concert hall.

'Are you not coming on to Laura Miano's?' Francesca asked the duchess.

'No, I am going home.'

She waited on the pavement for her brougham to come up. The rain was
passing over; patches of blue were beginning to appear between the great
banks of white cloud; a shaft of sunshine made the wet flags glitter.
Flooded by this pale rose splendour, her magnificent furs falling in
straight symmetrical folds to her feet, Elena was very beautiful. As
Andrea caught a glimpse of the inside of her brougham, all cosily lined
with white satin like a little boudoir, with its shining silver
foot-warmer for the comfort of her small feet, his dream of the
preceding evening came back to him--'Oh, to be there with her alone,
and feel the warm perfume of her breath mingling with the
violets--behind the mist-dimmed windows through which one hardly sees
the muddy streets, the gray houses, the dull crowd!'

But she only bowed slightly to him at the door, without even a smile,
and the next moment the carriage had flashed away in the direction of
the Palazzo Barberini, leaving the young man with a dim sense of
depression and heartache.

She only said 'perhaps,' so it was quite possible that she would not be
at the Palazzo Farnese that evening. What should he do then? The thought
that he might not see her was intolerable; already every hour he passed
far from her weighed heavily on his spirits. 'Am I then so deeply in
love with her already?' he asked himself. His spirit seemed imprisoned
within a circle in which the phantoms of all his sensations in presence
of this woman surged and wheeled around him. Suddenly there would emerge
from this tangle of memory, with singular precision, some phrase of
hers, an inflection of her voice, an attitude, a glance, the seat where
they had sat, the finale of the Beethoven sonata, a burst of melody from
Mary Dyce, the face of the footman who had held back the
_portiere_--anything that happened to have caught his attention at the
moment--and these images obscured by their extreme vividness the actual
life around him. He pleaded with her; said to her in thought what he
would say to her in reality by and by.

Arrived in his own rooms, he ordered tea of his man-servant, installed
himself in front of the fire and gav