“Are you dreaming, too?” he asked softly. “Wake up, child, you are too young to be tired and sleepy with the rest of us. And I have not inquired how you enjoyed your day, or how you liked my Bologna acquaintances? It is strange, is it not, that your new friend, Mr Ibbetson, should have been travelling with them? Leyton told me the reason, he is engaged to Miss Grey, and they are to be married very shortly.”
Chapter Eight.
“Blue Bubbles of Grapes down a Vineyard Row.”
The cleverest men make mistakes, and Oliver Trent had made a second. He had not told Bice his news about Ibbetson cruelly, or in such a manner as to force her to feel that either by start or word she had revealed to another the secret of which she had not actually been conscious until that moment. He had only mentioned it in her hearing, when the dusk of evening was there to hide any sign of emotion, treating it as a trivial matter with which Kitty was at least as much concerned as she, and he had talked on so as to give her time to recover her composure. His mistake lay in telling her at all. A woman who has received a wound of this kind may be brave enough to hide the wound, but she never forgets the hand that has wounded her. To the day of her death its touch recalls something of the sharpness of the first pang.
No one saw much of Bice through the next day. Trent let her alone, having a perception that she would not brook interference, and that, at whatever cost, he must be patient. Mrs Masters, when he asked her, said that she had taken Andrea’s daughter, Chiara, and had gone up to the podere to speak about the vintage.
“You let her do too much of that sort of work,” said Trent, frowning.
“How can I help it?” asked Mrs Masters, moving uneasily in her chair. “She has been accustomed to it ever since she was a child. I am quite unfitted for it, and, as you know, it is impossible for me to keep an agent. This poverty is odious. I suppose we shall save something this winter by letting the villa, and living with the Capponis in Rome; otherwise I have spent all the money you lent me, and have never even dared tell Bice I had it from you.”
“And how do you mean to help Clive?”