“Were you not here this morning?” I said to Violante, as I recognised her close by the box-wood arch under which she had first appeared to me.
She smiled, and I thought a momentary flash of colour passed over her cheeks. Only a few hours had passed, and I was amazed to find how the exact notion of time had escaped me. That short interval seemed full of confused events which gave it, to my consciousness, a deceptive length without any fixed limits. I was not yet able to sound the gravity of the life I had lived since the moment I had put foot in the cloister; but I felt that some dim change, fraught with incalculable results, was being worked within me quite apart from my own will; and I thought that, after all, the presentiment of the morning on the lonely road had not been vain.
“Why shouldn’t we sit down?” asked Antonello almost entreatingly. “Are you not tired yet?”
“Yes, let us sit down,” assented Anatolia, with her usual gentle condescension. “I am a little tired too. It is the spring air.... What a smell of violets!”
“But where is your white hawthorn?” I exclaimed, turning to Massimilla to show her that I had not forgotten her offer.
“It is a long way off still,” she replied.
“Where?”
“Down there.”
“Massimilla has her hiding-places,” said Anatolia, laughing. “When she hides no one can find her.”
“Like a little ferret,” I added.