She turned to go down. Andrea followed her. They walked in silence towards the stairway; they looked at the wood that stretched between the terrace and the Belvedere. The light seemed to stop short at the entrance to it, where stood the two guardian statues, unable to pierce the further gloom; and the trees looked as if they spread their branches in a different atmosphere, or rather in some dark waters at the bottom of the sea, like giant marine plants.
She was seized with sudden terror. Hastening towards the steps, she ran down five or six and then stopped, dazed and panting. Through the silence, she heard the beating of her heart like the roll of distant thunder. The Villa Medici was no longer in sight; the stairway was enclosed between two walls, damp and gray and with grass growing in the cracks, gloomy as a subterranean dungeon. She saw Andrea lean down swiftly to kiss her on the lips.
'No, no, Andrea—no!'
He stretched out his hands to draw her to him, to hold her fast.
'No!'
Wildly she seized one of his hands and carried it to her lips; she kissed it twice—thrice, with frenzied passion. Then she fled down the steps to the gate like a mad creature.
'Maria! Maria! Stop!'
They stood together before the closed gate, pale, panting, shaken, trembling from head to foot, gazing at one another with wide distraught eyes, their ears filled with the throb of their mad pulses, a sense of choking in their throats. Then suddenly, with one impulse, they were in each other's arms, heart to heart, lips to lips.
'Enough—you are killing me,' she murmured, leaning, half fainting, against the gateway, with a gesture of supreme entreaty.
For a moment, they stood facing one another without touching. All the silence of the Villa seemed to weigh upon them in this narrow spot enclosed in its high walls like an open tomb. High above them sounded the hoarse cawing of the rooks gathering on the roofs of the palaces or crossing the sky. Once more, a strange fear possessed Maria's heart. She cast a terror-stricken glance up at the top of the walls. Then, with a visible effort she said quickly: