When we rose from table, Anatolia proposed going down to the garden.
“Let us go and bask in the sun a little more!” she suggested, pointing to a shaft of sunbeams which shot down from the highest pane of a window where the faded curtains were not drawn. “Who will come?”
By the movement her hand was lit up, turned golden down to her wrist, and the rays slid through her fingers like docile hair. “We will all come,” I replied.
Don Ottavio begged to be excused, and retired (he seemed like an intruder among us); but the prince laid his arm in Anatolia’s, as Antonello had done before on the steps, and said—
“I will come down to the quadrangle with you.”
As we passed through the vast reception hall, now reduced to a disused anteroom, I noticed an old sedan chair with the two poles still in it, as if a lady had just descended from it, or was about to enter.
“Who uses the sedan chair?” I asked, as I stopped to look at it.
“None of us,” answered Anatolia after a moment’s hesitation, during which a shade of agitation passed over every face.
“It is of the time of Charles III.,” said the prince, concealing his melancholy thoughts under a smile. “It belonged to the Duchess of Cublana, Donna Raimondetta Montaga, who was the most beautiful lady of the court, and was praised as the greatest beauty of the kingdom.”