Maria rose amidst a round of applause. She left the piano, but she did not take away her gloves. Andrea was tempted to steal them.—Had she not perhaps left them for him?—But he only wanted one. As a connoisseur in amatory matters has said, a pair of gloves is a totally different thing from a single one.
Led back to the piano by the insistence of the Countess Starnina, Maria removed her gloves from the desk and placed them in a corner of the keyboard, in the shadow. She then played Rameau's Gavotte—the Gavotte of the Yellow Ladies—the never-to-be-forgotten dance of Indifference and Love.
Andrea regarded her fixedly with a little trepidation. When she rose, she took up one of her gloves. The other she left in the shadowy corner of the piano—for him.
Three days afterwards, when astonished Rome had awakened to find itself under a covering of snow, Andrea received a note to the following effect—
'Tuesday, 2 p. m.—To-night, between eleven and twelve o'clock, you will wait for me in a carriage in front of the Palazzo Barberini, outside the gates. If by midnight I am not there, you can go away again.—A stranger.'
The tone of the note was mysterious and romantic. Was it in remembrance of the 25th of March two years ago? Lady Heathfield seemed particularly fond of the use of carriages in her love affairs. Had she the intention of taking up the adventure at the point where it broke off? And why—A stranger? Andrea could not repress a smile. He had just come back from a visit to Maria—a very pleasing visit—and his heart inclined, for the moment, more to the Siennese than to the other. His ear still retained the sound of her sweet and gentle words as they stood together at the window and watched the snow falling soft as peach or apple blossom on the trees of the Villa Aldobrandini, already touched with the presentiment of the coming Spring. However, before going out to dinner, he gave very particular orders to Stephen.
Eleven o'clock found him in front of the palace, devoured by impatience and curiosity. The novelty of the situation, the spectacle of the snowy night, the mystery and uncertainty of it all, inflamed his imagination and transported him beyond the realities of life.
Over Rome, on that memorable February night, there shone a full moon of fabulous size and unheard of splendour. In that immense radiance, the surrounding objects seemed to exist only as in a dream, impalpable, meteoric, and visible at a great distance by virtue of some fantastic irradiation of their own. The snow covered the railings of the gateway, concealing the iron and transforming it into a piece of open-work, more frail and airy than filigree; while the white-robed Colossi supported it as oaks support a spider's web. The garden looked like a motionless forest of enormous and mis-shapen lilies all of ice; a garden under some lunar enchantment, a lifeless paradise of Selene. Mute, solemn and massive the Palazzo Barberini reared its great bulk into the sky, its most salient points standing out dazzlingly white and casting a pale blue shadow as transparent as light.
He waited, leaning forward on the watch; and under the fascination of that marvellous spectacle, he felt the spirits that wait on love awake in him, that the lyric summits of his sentiment began to gleam and glitter like the frozen shafts of the gateway under the moon. But he could not make up his mind which of the two women he would prefer as the centre of this fantastic scenery: Elena Heathfield robed in imperial purple, or Maria Ferrès robed in ermine. And as he lingered pleasurably over this uncertainty of choice, he ended by mingling and confounding his two anxieties—the real one for Elena and the imaginary one for Maria.
A clock near by struck in the silence with a clear vibrating sound, and each stroke seemed to break something crystalline in the air. The clock of the Trinità de' Monti responded to the call, and after that the clock of the Quirinal—then others faintly out of the distance. It was a quarter past eleven.