The Signora has an unconquerable timidity where other people’s reticences are concerned, and was far from emulating the amiable audacity of a close relative—at present on a visit to the Villino—whose voice she hears raised in the distance with query after query: “Where was it? In your leg? Does it hurt? Do you mind? Do you want to go back again?” But when she sees that the men indubitably like this frank attack, and respond, smiling and stimulated, the silence of her Canadian begins to weigh upon her. She tries him with a bashful question:
“Is your home in a town in Canada?”
“No, not in a town. Three hundred and eighty miles away from the nearest of any importance.”
“Oh, dear! Then it must take you a long time to hear from your people.”
The young harsh face darkens.
The post only comes to his home out yonder once a week, anyhow, but he hasn’t heard but once since he left. Not at all since he came to England wounded.
“Oh, dear!” exclaimed the Signora again, scenting a grievance. “But if it’s so far away, you couldn’t have heard yet.”
The lowering copper-hued countenance—it is curiously un-English, and reminds one vaguely of those frowning black marble busts in the Capitol: young Emperors already savagely conscious of their own unlimited power—takes a deeper gloom.
He could have heard. No. 9 had had a letter that morning, and his home was forty miles further north.