"As you please, cousin."
"Does she propose to amuse herself at my expense or his?" I thought. "Perhaps both."
I bowed slightly to signify my consent. Thereupon the cousin, with careless courtesy, pointed out to me a glass door at the end of the avenue, where the branches, drooping lower and lower until they formed a sort of arbor, concealed the front of the villa.
"At the end of the large salon, signor," he said, "you will find a study. The piano is there. I shall have the honor to see you again when you have finished. Shall we walk as far as the pond?" he added, turning to his cousin.
I saw her smile again, almost imperceptibly, but with the keenest delight at the mortification that I felt, while she let me go in one direction and continued her stroll in the other, leaning on the arm of her elegant and aristocratic cousin.
It is not a very difficult matter to put a piano almost in tune, and although I had never tried before, I succeeded very well; but I spent much more time about it than an experienced hand would have required, and I watched with some impatience the sun sinking behind the treetops; for I had no other pretext for another interview with my singular heroine than to hear her try the piano when it was in tune. So I worked away awkwardly enough, and was in the midst of a monotonous drumming with which I was almost deafening myself, when I raised my head and saw the signora before me, half turned toward the fireplace, but watching me in the mirror with malicious intentness. To meet her sidelong glance and turn my eyes away was a matter of a second. I continued my work with the utmost coolness, resolved to watch the enemy and see what she was driving at.
La Grimani—I continued to give her that name in my mind, knowing no other—made a pretence of arranging some flowers in the vases on the mantel with great care; then she moved a chair, moved it back to the place where it was before, dropped her fan, picked it up with a great rustling of her skirts, opened a window, and instantly closed it again, then, seeing that I was determined not to notice anything, she adopted the extreme course of dropping a stool on her pretty little foot and uttering a cry of pain. I was stupid enough to drop the key on the metallic strings, which emitted a piteous wail. The signora started, shrugged her shoulders, and, suddenly recovering all her self-possession, as if we were acting a scene in a burlesque, she looked me in the face and said:
"Cosa, signore?"
"I thought that your ladyship spoke to me," I replied, with no less tranquillity, and resumed my work. She remained standing in the middle of the room as if petrified by amazement in the face of such audacity, or as if brought to a standstill by a sudden doubt as to my identity with the person whom she had thought that she recognized. At last she lost patience, and asked me, almost roughly, if I had nearly finished.
"Oh! bless my soul, no! signora," I replied; "here is a broken string, you see." As I spoke I gave the key a sharp twist on the pin I was turning, and broke the string.