'But why did she go away sooner than usual this year?' she asked him one day with a smile.
'I have no idea,' answered Andrea, not without a touch of impatience and bitterness.
'Then it is all over between you—quite over?'
'For pity's sake, Bianca, let us talk about ourselves,' he retorted sharply. The subject disturbed and irritated him.
She remained pensive for a moment, as if seeking to unravel some enigma, then she smiled and shook her head with a little fugitive shadow of melancholy in her eyes.
'Such is love!' she sighed, and returned Andrea's kisses.
In her he seemed to possess all those charming women of whom Lorenzo the Magnificent sang:
'And on every side we find,
Absence, as men say, estranges,
Fancy ranges as the eye ranges,
Out of sight is out of mind.
Love departs and is not love:
As from sight the eye departs
Even so do hearts from hearts;
And at other hands we prove
Fancies love as the eyes rove,
Parted pleasures come again.'
When the summer came, and she was on the point of leaving Rome, she said to him, without seeking to conceal her gentle emotion—