"Am I enough for her?" the lover asked himself. "Yes, surely, for she feels that no other love can equal mine."
He really did love her very deeply. He had eyes for no one else. He never looked at a woman except to compare her with Margherita and find her inferior. The more he became a man, the more she a woman, the more their love took flame. Anania had days of delirium in which he thought of the long years that must elapse ere he could have her, and felt the waiting an impossibility, felt he must die consumed by desire. But on the whole he loved her calmly, with patience, with constancy, and purity.
During the last vacation they had often been alone together in Margherita's courtyard, under the chaste eyes of the stars, the impassive face of the moon. Their meetings were facilitated by the servant who was also the medium of their correspondence. For the most part they were silent, Margherita trembling lightly, pensive, and vigilant. Anania panted, smiled, and sighed, oblivious of time and space, of all the things and affairs of men.
"You are so cold!" he would say. "Why don't you speak the same words that you write?"
"I'm afraid."
"Of what? If your father surprises us, I will kneel to him and say, 'No, we are doing no harm. We are united for eternity.' Don't be afraid, my dearest! I will be worthy of you. I have a future before me. I intend to be somebody."
She made no answer. She did not say that if Signor Carboni were to find out, the future might be shattered. But she continued vigilant.
At bottom her coldness was not displeasing to Anania, and only augmented his ardour. Often seeing her so beautiful and so frozen, her eyes shining in the moonlight like the pearl eyes of an idol, he dared not kiss her. He gazed at her in silence, and his breast heaved with felicity or with anguish he knew not which. Once he said—
"Margherita, I feel like a beggar on the threshold of a wondrous palace given him by a fairy into which he dares not enter."
"God be praised, the sea is calm," said the priest, Anania's fellow-traveller. The young man started from his memories and looked at the gold-green sea, which in the dusk suggested a moonlit plain, at the ruins of a little church, at a path through the thickets, lost on the extreme verge of the shore, as if traced by a dreamer who had hoped to carry it on across the velvet ripples of the sea. He thought of Chateaubriand's Renato, and fancied he saw that melancholy figure on a rock which overhung the waves.