OH BELLO!
An hour or two has passed. A slow and cautious step, accompanied with the tapping of a stick upon the stone flags of the floor, is audible along the narrow passage leading from the sala to Pipa's room. It is as dark as pitch. Whoever it is, is afraid of falling, and creeps along cautiously, feeling by the wall.
Pipa, expecting to be summoned to her mistress—Pipa, wondering greatly indeed what Enrica can be about, and why she does not go to bed, when she, the blessed dear, was so faint and tired, and crying—oh, so pitifully!—when she left her—Pipa, leaning against the door-post near the half-open door, dozing like a dog with one eye open in case she should be called—listened and looked out into the passage. A figure is standing within the light that streams out from the door, a very well-remembered figure, stout and short—a little bent forward on a stick—with a round, rosy face framed in snowy curls, a world of pleasant wickedness in two twinkling eyes, on which the light strikes, and a mouth puckered up for any mischief.
"Madonna!" cries Pipa, rubbing her eyes—"the cavaliere! How you did frighten me! I cannot bear to hear footsteps about when Adamo is out;" and Pipa gazes up and down into the darkness with an unpleasant consciousness that something ghostly might be watching her.
"Pipa," says the cavaliere, putting his finger to his nose and winking palpably, "hold your tongue, and don't scream when I tell you something. Promise me."
"O Gesù!" cries Pipa in a loud voice, starting back, forgetting his injunction—"is it not about the signorina?"
"Hold your tongue, Pipa, or I will tell you nothing."
Pipa's head is instantly close to the cavaliere's, her face all eagerness.
"Yes, it is about the signorina—the countess. She is gone!"
"Gone!" and Pipa, spite of warning, fairly shouts now "gone!" at which the cavaliere shakes his stick at her, smiling, however, benignly all the time. "Holy mother! gone! O cavaliere! tell me—she is not dead?"