There was a sardonic sneer upon her lips, a manifest mocking scorn in her voice. She settled herself on a wide divan covered with a Bokhara carpet of faded amaranthine hues on which languished great cushions embroidered with spreading palms of dull gold. Here she leaned back in an easy, graceful attitude, and gazed at Andrea from under her drooping eyelids, while she spoke of trivial society matters in a voice that insinuated its tones into the young man's heart, and crept through his blood like an invisible fire.
Two or three times, he surprised a look which Lord Heathfield fixed upon his wife—a look that seemed surcharged with all the infamies he had stirred up just now. Again that criminal thought sped through his mind. He trembled in every fibre of his being. He started to his feet, livid and convulsed.
'Going already?' exclaimed Lord Heathfield. 'Why, what is the matter?' and he smiled a singular smile at his 'young friend.' He knew well the effect of his books.
Sperelli bowed. Elena gave him her hand without rising. Her husband accompanied him to the door, where he repeated in a low voice—'You won't forget those clasps?'
As Andrea stood in the portico, he saw a carriage coming up the drive. A man with a great golden beard nodded to him from the window. It was Galeazzo Secinaro.
In a flash, the recollection of the May Bazaar came back to him, and the episode of Galeazzo offering Elena a sum of money if she would dry her beautiful hands, all wet with champagne, on his beard. He hurried through the garden and out into the street. He had a dull confused sense as of some deafening noise going on inside his head.
It was an afternoon at the end of April, warm and moist.
The sun appeared and disappeared again among the fleecy slow-sailing clouds. The languor of the sirocco lay over Rome.
On the pavement in front of him in the Via Sistina, he perceived a lady walking slowly in the direction of the Trinità. He recognised her as Donna Maria Ferrès. He looked at his watch; it was on the stroke of five; only a minute or two before the accustomed hour of meeting. Maria was assuredly on her way to the Palazzo Zuccari.
He hastened forward to join her. When he reached her side, he called her by name.