"Have you rested a little?" he asked.
"I have slept two or three hours. And you? You look tired."
"I have had no time to sleep. I shall sleep to-night."
He leaned back in the small green arm-chair and rested his head against a coarse netted antimacassar. His eyes caught Regina's, but she was looking down thoughtfully at her hands, which lay in her lap together but not clasped. Peasant women often do that; their hands are resting then, after hard work, and they are thinking of nothing.
"Look at me," Marcello said after a long time.
Her glance was sad and almost dull, and there was no light in her face. She had made up her mind that something dreadful was going to happen to her, and that the end was coming soon. She could not have told why she felt it, and that made it worse. Her eyes had the indescribable look that one sees in those of a beautiful sick animal, the painful expression of an unintelligent suffering which the creature cannot understand. Regina, roused to act and face to face with danger, was brave, clever, and quick, but under the mysterious oppression of her forebodings she was the Roman hill woman, apathetic, hopeless, unconsciously fatalistic and sleepily miserable.
"What is the matter?" Marcello asked. "What has happened?"
"I shall know when you have told me," Regina answered, slowly shaking her head; and again she looked down at her hands.
"What I have come to tell you will not make you sad," Marcello replied.
"Speak, heart of my heart. I listen."