While they worked together, Mila busied herself preparing their breakfast. She went back and forth from one room to another, but passed more frequently than was absolutely necessary along the gallery of which we have spoken. She had a secret reason for this. Magnani's chamber, which, to tell the truth, was only a wretched garret with a window in which there was no glass—the warm climate making that luxury unnecessary for people in good health—was at the corner of the house nearest to the gallery, and by leaning over the rail one could talk with a person who happened to be sitting at the window of that modest apartment. Magnani was not in his room; he only passed the night there, and at daylight went to his work elsewhere, or worked out-of-doors on the gallery opposite the one on which Mila often sat at her work. From there she could watch him without looking at him, for hours at a time, and not lose a single one of his movements, although she did not seem to lift her eyes from her work.
But on this morning she walked back and forth to no purpose. He was not on the gallery, although he had promised her, as well as the princess, not to go away from home. Had he allowed himself to be overcome by sleep, after two sleepless nights? That was hardly consistent with what she knew of his stoical determination and of his inexhaustible strength. Doubtless he was breakfasting with his parents. But Mila, who had stopped more than once to listen to the tumultuous voices of the Magnani family, could not distinguish the grave, manly tones which she knew so well.
She looked at the window of his garret. The room was dark and empty as usual. Magnani had no luxurious habits as Michel had, and he had always crushed within himself any craving for refinement in his surroundings. Whereas Pier-Angelo and his daughter, in anticipation of the cardinal's death and the young painter's arrival, had made ready for that beloved child a neat, clean, airy attic chamber, furnished with the best that they could spare from their own furniture, Magnani slept on a rug thrown on the floor by his window, to make the most of the little air which could find its way in through that loophole, recessed as it was between two walls. The only embellishment which he had introduced consisted of a box which he had placed on the outer edge of that yawning aperture, and in which he had sown a few pretty convolvuli which formed a frame of fresh flowers for the window.
He watered them every day; but during the last forty-eight hours he had been so engrossed that he had forgotten them; the pretty white bells had closed and drooped languidly upon their half-withered leaves.
Mila, carrying one of her earthen jugs perched lightly on her head, an enormous braid of hair thrice twisted acting as a cushion, noticed that her neighbor's convolvuli were dying of thirst; that would have afforded a pretext for speaking to him if he had been anywhere about; but there was nobody in that retired and sheltered corner. Mila tried, by stretching her arm over the rail, to reach the poor plants and give them a few drops of water. But her arm was too short, and the jug did not reach the box. Children cannot bear the impossible, and when they have undertaken a thing they go on with it at the peril of their lives. How many times have we climbed upon a window to reach a swallow's nest, and counted with the tips of our fingers the little warm eggs on their bed of down!
Little Mila spied a stout branch of grapevine which hung along the wall like a bell-rope and was twisted about the rail of the gallery. To climb over the rail and cling to the vine did not seem to her very difficult. In this way she reached the window. But, as she raised her lovely arm to water the convolvuli, a strong hand seized her slender wrist, and a brown face, wearing a smile that displayed two rows of large white teeth, stooped toward hers.
Magnani, not wishing to sleep, nor, on the other hand, to seem to be watching what was taking place in the house, as Agatha had ordered, had lain down on his rug to rest his weary limbs. But his mind and his eyes were wide open, and, at every risk, he had seized that stealthy arm whose shadow passed across his face.
"Let me go, Magnani," said the girl, more deeply moved by the meeting than by the risk she might be incurring; "you will throw me down! this vine is giving way under me."
"Throw you down, my dear child!" replied the young man, passing a powerful arm about her waist. "Unless this arm is cut off, and then the other, you shall never fall!"
"Never? that is saying a good deal, for I love to climb, and you won't always be with me."