"They will be miserable," he said. "That will teach them." Then he went to his furnished rooms on the Corso, and slept well.
In Villa Solitudine they were miserable, and it taught them.
It taught Nancy that the Closed Garden she had had a glimpse of for so brief an hour was the only garden in the world that she ever wanted to enter; and that all the words Aldo had not said were the only words she ever wanted to hear; that perfect goodness and unwavering strength must lie behind his portentous beauty, white and immovable like marble lions at a palace gate.
It taught Clarissa that one must accept the inevitable—that half a loaf was better than no bread, and that a married Aldo was better than no Aldo at all. It made her look at Nancy with closer eyes, and say to herself that she was a little creature one would easily tire of, in spite of—or because of—her intellectuality. Aldo was not a closed garden for Clarissa; she knew the feeble flowers that bowed behind its gates.
A hot, dreary week passed with no news from Aldo. Then Clarissa telegraphed to him at Milan. She said she had told Carlo about their conversation regarding his wish to marry Nancy, and Carlo approved. Would he come back?
Yes; Aldo would come back. He waited another day or two, and at the close of a sultry afternoon he sauntered in, just as he had sauntered out, across the sleepy, bee-droning lawns of the Villa Solitudine. He stopped at the entrance of the summer-house, where Nancy sat reading a letter—a long letter. Already two of the blue sheets had fallen at her side. Before her on the table was the inkstand and the ivory pen and The Book. As his shadow passed the threshold she looked up; she drew a quick breath, and her face turned milky white, with a pallor that gripped at Aldo's nerves.
Once more, and for the last time, he bent his head over her hand. "Signora, I am your slave," he said. But as he raised his eyes she knew that he had said: "Nancy, I am your master."
"Who writes to you?" he asked.
She drooped submissive lashes, and the colour ran into her cheeks. "Mr. Kingsley, the English friend," she said. "Do you remember him?"
Aldo took her hand and with it the letter in his own.