"Does she pray? Does she contemplate? Does she weep? Or, perhaps, has she become inert, and suffers no more than a withered apple in the back of some old closet."
"What if she should suddenly show herself at that window?" said Stelio, feeling something like a real sensation, as he fancied he heard a creaking hinge.
Both looked closely at the nailed blinds.
"Perhaps she is sitting behind them, looking at us," he added, in a half whisper.
This thought made them both shudder.
They were leaning against a wall facing the house, and did not wish to move a step. The encircling inertia affected them, the smoke-like mist enveloped them more and more thickly; the chatter of the birds lulled their senses as a drug given to feverish patients. The siren whistles pierced the air from afar. The brown leaves dropped from the trees. How long it took for a floating leaf to reach the earth! All around them was mist, heaviness, slow consumption, ashes.
CHAPTER II
AFTER THE STORM
"I must die, my dear—I must die!" said La Foscarina, in a heart-rending voice, after a long silence, raising her face from the cushions where she had buried it, after a stormy scene of passion, in which the ardent words of her beloved had given her as much pain as pleasure.
She looked at Stelio, who had thrown himself, half reclining, on a divan near the balcony, and now lay silent, his eyes half-closed, his disordered hair touched with a ray of gold from the setting sun. She realized that she was possessed by an incurable madness, spreading throughout her declining body. Lost! Lost! She was irrevocably lost!