“Where were Anatolia and Violante, what were they doing just then? Were they also in the garden?” I saw them appearing at the turn of every path, and imagined the expression of their first look as they met us. And I thought of the strangeness of the behaviour of both during the past few days, and sought to discover its true meaning. Anatolia rose before me with her kind, heroic, martyr’s smile, resigned to pour out her heart’s strength to the last drop that she might soothe incurable ills; she rose before me with those pure eyes of hers, which at times flashed invitingly like the waters of legendary lakes when a sudden glitter reveals the existence of hidden treasures. Wrapped in her apathy and disdain, Violante rose before me in an enigmatic attitude which might almost be hostile, and inspired me with a kind of discomfort such as gloomy presentiments are wont to produce; for behind her in my imagination was her fatal rock, and the mystery of her distant apartments clouded with deadly perfumes.
I should like to have asked her who was at my side: “Is there any change in your beloved sisters’ voices when they speak to you or to each other? Is there anything that hurts you sometimes in their voices and their looks? And at times when you are sitting side by side breathing the same air, does a heavy silence fall upon you, like the silence before a storm? And then do you feel all your tenderness dry up, and a bitterness like venom rise within you? And, tell me, do your sisters weep apart? Or does it sometimes happen that you all weep together?”
Thus would I fain have questioned the silent maiden, and with her have suffered the pain of loving.
I looked at her. She was suffering and rejoicing. “You always carry a book,” I said, for the sake of breaking the charm, “like a sibyl.”
She showed me the volume.
“It is the book I had that first day,” she said, with the indefinable tone in her voice which betrays the moisture of tears.
“And the blade of grass?”
“Is burnt up.”
“Put in a red rose instead.”
But there was such humble grace in her emotion, she let her inward ardour appear so ingenuously, that I could not leave her, nor resist the sweetness of seeing her melt little by little.