Again he nodded. In a moment he had gone.
Leilah, closing the gate behind him watched him go. It was, she felt, her last earthly sight of him. There would be no going away together. He would never come back. Never. His mother, if she knew the truth, could only substantiate it. If she did not, another would. Helplessly she held at the gate. A vagrant passed, she did not see. A hawker called, she did not hear. She was not only helpless, she was hopeless. She wished that death really were, that it could beneficently come, take her, shroud her in blankness, in endless oblivion of what was and of what might have been. Long since the dogs, mollified by Verplank’s exit, had ceased to bark. Shrilly now from the church came boys’ fresh voices. The music of them stirred her a little and she turned.
Before her, framed in a window of the dining room, Barouffski stood. At sight of him she started. Amiably he smiled. When she looked again he had vanished.
But, in a moment, in the doorway beneath, smiling still, he reappeared.
“What a beautiful day, is it not?” Oilily he rubbed his hands. “You have been having visitors, cara mia?”
As he spoke he moved toward her. Urbanely he continued! “And what did they have to say?”
He was quite near her now and, with his head held a trifle to one side he was regarding her with affectionate indulgence, much as one would regard a child.
“They told you nothing new, cara mia?”
Without looking at him, Leilah shook her head. “Nothing. Nothing at least that I did not know.”
Smiling still, indulgent as before, Barouffski plucked at his pointed beard. “And what is that, cara mia?”