She was seated motionless on a stone plinth which had once supported an urn. Her elbow rested on her knee, her chin in her hand; in this simple attitude her whole figure expressed that succession of mute harmonies which is the secret of supreme art. She seemed to be present with us, and yet apart. Upon her low forehead was visible the reflection of the ideal crown that she wore upon her thoughts; and her hair, gathered up in a great knot on her neck, seemed to have obeyed the same rhythm which regulates the repose of the sea.
“Massimilla,” said Oddo, introducing the third sister.
I turned, and found she was already close to us. She was ascending the last steps with her light tread. Her face and her whole person bore traces of the dream in which she had been plunged, of the intimate poetry of the hour just past, spent with a faithful book in the solitude of the nook known to her alone.
“Where have you been?” asked Oddo before she reached us.
She smiled shyly, and a faint colour tinged her thin cheeks.
“Down there,” she answered, “reading.”
Her voice sounded liquid and silvery as it came through the delicate lips. There was a blade of grass as a marker in the pages of her book.
As I bowed she gave me her hand, still with the same shy smile. And something of the tender compassion I used to feel long ago for the little invalid my mother visited awoke again in my soul; for her hand was so slight and soft, that it reminded me of those slender flowers called day lilies, which bloom for one day only in the hot sand.
She did not speak, and neither could I find words delicate enough to be appropriate to her timid grace.
“Shall we go up?” said Anatolia, turning to me, her clear voice at once breaking through the kind of spell which the unutterable melancholy of our thoughts had cast over us as we sat in the warmth under the trellis.