She heard the hoofs of a horse cantering up behind her, and she looked round. Castiglione must have turned in the saddle to look after her, and must have seen the parasol fall. It lay with the handle upward, and parasol handles chanced to be long that year. It was easy for a good rider to bend low and pick the thing up almost without slackening his pace, and in another moment he was beside the carriage giving it back to Maria.
‘Thank you,’ she said faintly. ‘I did not know you were in Rome.’
A quick word rose to his lips, but he checked it. Then he bent down to her from the saddle, on pretence of brushing an imaginary fly from his horse’s shoulder.
‘I thought you would rather not know it from me,’ he said quietly, but so low that the deaf coachman could not hear. ‘Good morning, Contessa,’ he added more loudly, as he straightened himself in the saddle and saluted again.
He was gone, trotting back to join his companion; but she would not look after him when she had told Telemaco to drive on. And all the way home a great wave of joy was surging up round her, to her very feet, and she was trying to climb higher lest it should rise and overwhelm her; and she was clinging to something dark, and cold, and hard as a black marble pillar, that was Montalto, and duty, and death, all in one.
That afternoon a note came for her, brought to the door by a trooper and left with the remark that there was no answer.
It contained the telegram Castiglione had received in Milan, and a sheet of note-paper on which a few words were written in pencil.
‘This explains itself,’ he wrote. ‘It is the inevitable. I shall not try to see you.’ She knew that she ought to be proud of his good faith, but it was not easy.