“I remember.”
“What a long time ago it is!”
“What a long time!”
“Now there is not much difference between Linturno and Trigento,” said Antonello, stroking his beard hesitatingly with slender fingers, while his eyes seemed to have lost consciousness of outward things. “You will see to-morrow.”
“You are disheartening him!” interrupted Oddo with some irritation. “He won’t come to-morrow.”
“Yes, yes, I will come,” I assured them, but I had to force myself to smile and shake off my own overpowering melancholy. “I will come, and shall find some way of cheering you up. You seem to me a little ill from loneliness, a little depressed.”
Antonello, who was sitting opposite me, laid his hand on my knee and leant forward to look into my eyes with an indefinable expression of fear and anxiety written in his face, as though he had perceived some terrible meaning in my words, and wished to question me about it. And once more his white face close to my own seemed even in the daylight to belong to a different world, where it existed alone; and brought to my mind those emaciated, spiritual faces that stand out from the mysterious backgrounds of sacred pictures darkened by time and the smoke of candles.
It was only for a moment. He drew back again without speaking.
“I have brought my horses with me,” I added, controlling my agitation; “we shall go for long rides every day. You must take exercise and shake off the idleness and ennui. How do you pass the hours?”
“In counting them,” said Oddo.