There was a pause.
“And do you love me?” he asked.
She turned and looked at him searchingly. He seemed outside her.
“I do,” she said.
But she said it out of complacency and a desire not to be harried. There was a curious breach of silence between them, which frightened him.
They lay rather late, then he rang for breakfast. She wanted to be able to go straight downstairs and away from the place, when she got up. She was happy in this room, but the thought of the publicity of the hall downstairs rather troubled her.
A young Italian, a Sicilian, dark and slightly pock-marked, buttoned up in a sort of grey tunic, appeared with the tray. His face had an almost African imperturbability, impassive, incomprehensible.
“One might be in Italy,” Skrebensky said to him, genially. A vacant look, almost like fear, came on the fellow’s face. He did not understand.
“This is like Italy,” Skrebensky explained.
The face of the Italian flashed with a non-comprehending smile, he finished setting out the tray, and was gone. He did not understand: he would understand nothing: he disappeared from the door like a half-domesticated wild animal. It made Ursula shudder slightly, the quick, sharp-sighted, intent animality of the man.