Now he turned to her again. His face was livid. His lips drew when he spoke.
"You will go back...?" he stammered. "You will go back to that ... that Minotaur?" His teeth ground on the word. It was terrible to see the man, usually so still, so self-controlled, stripped of all reserve.
"I must.... I must ... for my boy's sake. Ah, don't look at me with such eyes!... I can't bear your face ... so different!"
She trembled still more violently, put up her hand to shut out the ghastly, devastated look of his face.
"You go back? You go back to him?" he kept muttering. "Che orrore ... che orrore...." All at once he gripped himself. He said in a strange, level tone: "There is nothing I can do, then. I would give my life ... yet there is nothing ... no way that I can serve you...."
"Amaldi ... Amaldi ..." she murmured. She caught his hand in both her own. "Oh, forgive me...." she said; "dear, dear Amaldi, forgive me!"
He bent and kissed the hands that clasped his.
"There is nothing to forgive," he answered.
It seemed to Sophy afterwards, when she came more to her usual self out there on the glee of blue waters, far from Le Vigne, that they two had been like actors moving through some pantomime, during those last moments. In silence they had walked together to the darsena; in silence he had assisted her into the launch; in silence she had sat watching Luigi start the engine. No other farewell had passed between them. In the moments following that disastrous, tragic crisis, all convention had withered. They had not even a subconscious sense of the mimic civilities due to Luigi's presence. And over Sophy stole that numbness which comes as anodyne to deep natures which have been called on to endure too many and too violent shocks within a short period. For a few moments, there face to face with Amaldi, she had suffered intensely. Now that was past. She felt quiet, and oddly cramped, as though crouching in a little capsule of stillness at the cyclone's heart....