A mad desire to scream, to sob, to throw herself on the ground, to hurt herself, to make herself ill, to die, assailed the distracted woman. Again she raised her eyes to the silent sky. The tops of the tall hornbeams were reddened, like logs when they have ceased to blaze and are about to fall in ashes.
"I can see you!" suddenly said a laughing voice, in the deep shadows, very near her.
"Where are you?"
He laughed among the leaves, but without revealing himself, like a faun in hiding. This game excited him; his body grew warm and supple by this exercise of his agility; and the wild mystery, the contact with the earth, the odor of autumn, the strangeness of this unexpected adventure, the woman's bewilderment, even the presence of the marble deities mingled with his physical pleasure an illusion of antique poetry and grace.
"Where are you? Oh, do not play any more! Do not laugh in that way! Enough!"
He had crept, bareheaded, into the bushes on his hands and knees. He felt the dead leaves, the soft moss. And as he breathed among the branches, and felt his heart throb with the strange delight of the situation, with the communion between his own life and the vegetable life around him, the spell of his fancy renewed among those winding ways the industry of the first maker of wings, the myth of the monster that was born of Pasiphaë and the Bull, the Attic legend of Theseus in Crete. All that ancient world became real to him. In that glowing autumn evening, he was transfigured, according to the instincts of his blood and the recollections of his mind, into one of those ambiguous forms, half animal and half divine, one of those glittering genii whose throats were swollen with the same gland that hangs from the neck of the goat. A joyous voluptuousness suggested strange surprises to him, suggested the swiftness of pursuit, of flight, capture, and a fleeting embrace in the shadows of the wood. Then he desired some one like himself, fresh youthfulness that could share his laughter, two light feet to fly before him, two arms to resist him, a prize to capture at last. Donatella with her curved figure recurred to his mental vision.
"Enough, Stelio! I cannot run any more. I shall fall."
La Foscarina uttered a scream on feeling her skirt pulled by a hand that had reached through the shrubbery. She bent down, and saw in the shadows the face of a laughing faun. The laughter struck her ear without calming her distress, without breaking the sense of suffering that overpowered her. As she looked at his boyish face, she saw at the same instant the face of the singer, who seemed to be stooping with her, imitating her movement as if she were a shadow. Her mind became more confused, and she could not distinguish between illusion and reality. The other woman seemed to overthrow her, oppress her, suffocate her.
"Leave me! Leave me! It is not I whom you seek!"