He made her sit down and knelt before her without ceasing to kiss her lids. Suddenly he started. He had felt her long lashes tremble on his lips like the flutter of an airy wing. Time was, when Elena had laughingly given him that caress twenty times in succession. Maria had learned it from him, and at that caress he had often managed to conjure up the image of the other.
His start made Maria smile; and as a tear still lingered on her lashes—'This one too,' she said.
He kissed it away, and she laughed softly without a thought of suspicion.
Her tears had ceased, and, reassured, she turned almost gay and full of charming graces.
'I am going to make the tea now,' she said.
'No, stay where you are.' The image of Elena had suddenly interposed between them.
'No, let me get up,' begged Maria, disengaging herself from his constraining arms. 'I want you to taste my tea. The aroma will penetrate to your very soul.'
She was alluding to some costly tea she had received from Calcutta which she had given to Andrea the day before.
She rose and went over to the arm-chair with the dragons in which the melting shades of the rosa di gruogo of the ancient dalmatic continued to languish exquisitely. The little cups of fine Castel-Durante Majolica still glittered on the tea-table.
While preparing the tea, she said a thousand charming things, she let all the goodness and tenderness of her fond heart bloom out with entire freedom; she took an ingenuous delight in this dear and secret intimacy, the hushed calm of the room with all its accessories of refined luxury. Behind her, as behind the Virgin in Botticelli's tondo, rose the tall vases crowned with sprays of white lilac, and her archangelic hands moved about among the little mythological pictures of Luzio Dolci and the hexameters of Ovid beneath them.