She let her hands fall to her side, and drew a step farther back with an action full of the gentlest dignity. 'Will you go now, Dino? I would rather that you went.'
'I will go. Will you not look at me once more, Italia?'
She hesitated for a second or two, and then, slowly, she lifted her large dark eyes. Her white face above the straight sombre folds of her mantle made her seem like the pale ghost of the radiant Italia of yesterday. His heart gave a great throb of love and passionate pity.
'My poor little girl, how I have hurt you! My poor little child!'
'Don't be sorry,' she said faintly, her eyes filling suddenly with tears. She tried to smile, but her lips only quivered pitifully. She could not speak: she lifted her arm and pointed to the stair.
When he looked back she was kneeling with clasped hands before the image of the Madonna above the closed church door.
*****
The air was very fresh and cool. The early morning dew was lying thickly on the soft powdery dust of the high road, and on the short crisp turf of the downs. As Dino reached the turning in the path the first red light of the rising sun touched the black belfry above the church, and glittered here and there on some of the higher windows in the village. Far below him, seen between the folding of the downs, a white mist was lying over the motionless gray plain of the sea.
Afterwards, he could never remember very distinctly what he had done with himself that day. There was nothing to call him back to Leghorn. There seemed nothing to call him back anywhere. Until Valdez should summon him, he was powerless to act: had he not committed himself, his life, his future, had he not delivered it all over, bound hand and foot, into the inexorable grasp of those men? And what did it matter how or when it was disposed of?
For the moment, he felt so indifferent to all that concerned himself that, had Valdez been there before him, he would not have asked him a single question. That he was to forfeit his life in this proposed attempt was so much a foregone conclusion he did not even think of it. He could have sworn that he had never thought of it once since that first branding instant of revelation; but the conviction of it had eaten its way into him until it had become a part of his slightest, most involuntary action. When he spoke of 'next year,' 'next month,' when he used the very word 'to-morrow,' he checked himself like a man on the verge of betraying a secret; it seemed to him so incredible that he alone, among all the living, breathing creatures about him, should stand unobserved, encompassed by the very shadow of death. When his mother looked at him suddenly he felt that she must read his sentence on his face. At times he was filled with a dull wonder at their blindness; it was like slowly sinking in a quicksand while they stood near, looking on with smiling eyes.