“Yes, it is Brito,” repeated Sebastião.
“I was right.” He remained an instant motionless, with his eyes fixed on the ground. Then, speaking in his former querulous tones, he said, “Well, I must drag myself home.” He sighed and looked up. “Ah, if I only had your health, Sebastião!” he said. And waving him a farewell with a hand encased in a dark woollen glove, he continued on his way, bending forward, and supporting himself by the wall as he went along.
Sebastião remained preoccupied. Every one began to notice that a man young and elegant called at Luiza’s house every day in a carriage, and remained there two or three hours. The neighbors lived in such close proximity, and they were so malicious! In the afternoon he went out. He wanted to see Luiza; but he felt, without knowing why, a sense of oppression, as if he feared to find her changed in some way. He was going slowly up the street under his umbrella, wrapt in thought, when he saw a coupé coming towards him at a trot. In another moment it had stopped at Luiza’s door. A gentleman descended hastily from it, threw away his cigar, and went into the house. He was tall, wore a mustache with the ends turning up, and had a flower in his buttonhole. Sebastião comprehended at once that this must be Cousin Bazilio. The coachman wiped the perspiration from his forehead, and crossing his legs, began to roll a cigarette.
At the noise of the carriage Senhor Paula came out to his doorstep, with his cap awry, his hands in his pockets, and looking askance. The coal-vender opposite, dirty and disfigured by obesity, also showed her greasy countenance at her door. The servant of the professor opened her window hastily. Paula crossed the sunny street quickly, and entered the shop in front. A few moments afterwards he reappeared in the doorway, accompanied by the shopkeeper, who had all the air of the inconsolable widow. They whispered together, their malicious glances fixed alternately on the windows of Luiza’s house and on the coupé. Paula, shuffling along in his carpet slippers, went to whisper with the coal-vender, eliciting from her, by his words, a laugh that shook her ample chest, and then took up his post in his own doorway, between a likeness of Dom João VI., on the one side, and two antique choir-chairs on the other, watching Luiza’s door with a jubilant expression of countenance. Through the silence resounded the notes of the “Virgin’s Prayer,” which some one in the neighborhood was practising on the piano.
Sebastião looked up mechanically, as he passed, at the windows of Luiza’s house.
“What a warm day, Sebastião!” said Paula, with an inclination of the head. “It is a pleasure to be in the shade.”
CHAPTER VII.
A CONSULTATION.
MEANTIME Luiza and Bazilio were seated, tranquil and happy, in the parlor within, the half-drawn curtains making a soft obscurity in the room. Luiza wore a fresh white morning-gown that diffused an agreeable odor of lavender.
“I shall present myself thus,” she had said, “without ceremony.”
She was charming thus; thus he would always like to see her, Bazilio had answered gayly, as if in this morning-gown he beheld a promise of friendlier relations between them. He had entered tranquilly, with the air of a real relative. He did not annoy her by bold words; he spoke to her of the heat, of a farce he had seen the night before, of old friends that he had met; but mentioned to her only en passant that he had been dreaming of her.