Before Maria went home she put the money she had taken into a rather shabby grey velvet bag. For a few moments she stood still, watching the fast-diminishing crowd in the distance and the changing light on the trunks of the pines. Then her eyes fell unawares on the ilexes, and she started and instantly bent down her head so as not to see them, and her hands tightened a little on the old velvet bag she held. Without looking up again she turned and went under the curtain to the back of the booth where her footman was waiting with a long cloak that quite hid her pretty costume; and she covered her head and the crimson kerchief with a thick black lace veil, and went away towards the avenue where her brougham was waiting.
Just before she reached it, and as if quite by accident, Oderisio Boccapaduli came strolling by. He helped her to get in and begged her to excuse him if he had not come back to the booth before she had left it, adding that he had met his mother, which was quite true, and that she had detained him, which was a stretch of his imagination.
‘Get in with me,’ Maria answered as he stood at the open door of the carriage. ‘If you are going away, too, I will take you into town and drop you wherever you like.’
He thanked her and accepted the invitation with alacrity, though he wondered why it was given. He could not have understood that she was physically afraid to be alone with her memory just then.
CHAPTER II
Maria asked her friend Giuliana Parenzo to lunch with her the next day. If Baldassare Castiglione came at three o’clock, and if it seemed wiser not to refuse him the door outright, he should at least not find her alone.
The Countess occupied one floor of a rather small house in the broad Via San Martino, near the railway station. It was a sunny apartment, furnished very simply but very prettily. After her husband had left her she had declined to accept any allowance from him and had moved out of the old palace, in which the state apartment was now shut up, while the rest of the great building was now occupied by a cardinal, an insurance company, and a rich Chicago widow. Maria lived on her own fortune, which was not large, but was enough, as she had been an only child and both her parents were dead.
Giuliana sat on her right at the small square table, and on her left was seated a sturdy boy over eight years old, and lately promoted to sailor’s clothes. Why are all boys now supposed to go to sea between six and eight or nine, or even until ten and twelve?