That night she dreamed she was standing on the river-bank in the company of Marianna, Madame Makuline's companion, who had come to hurry her back to Rome.
"Monsieur Antonio is in an awful rage," she said. "He came to Madame and told her all about it, and has borrowed 10,000 lire to set up a finer house. Then he sent me to bring you back."
In her dream Regina shook with shame and anger. She set off with rapid steps to Viadana, intending to send Antonio a thundering telegram.
"If he has still got the money," she sobbed, "I wish him to give it all back this very moment. I don't want a finer house. I don't want anything! I'll come home at once. I'd come back, even if we had grown poorer, even if we had to live in a garret!"
And she walked and walked, as one walks in dreams, vainly trying to run, crushed by unspeakable grief. Night fell; the mist covered the river. Viadana seemed farther and farther. Marianna ran behind Regina, telling her that the day before in Via Tritone she had met the ugly fireman who had rescued her at Odessa.
"He had turned into a priest, if you please; but coquettish, and under his cassock he had a silk petticoat with three flounces, which made a frou-frou." And she laughed.
Her unpleasant expression exasperated Regina almost to fits. She was not laughing at the fireman, but at something else, unknown, mysterious and terrible. Suddenly Regina turned and tried to strike her, but the signorina started backwards and Regina tumbled down.
The shock of this fall wakened the dreamer, whose first conscious thought was of the fireman priest with the silk flounces. In the dream this detail had disgusted her horribly, and the disgust remained for long hours. Sleep had deserted her. It was still night, but already across the deep silence which precedes the dawn came the earliest sounds of the quiet country life—a tinkling of tiny bells trembling on the banks of the streams, going always farther and farther away. The silvery, insistent, childish note seemed to Regina the voice of infinite melancholy.
A thousand memories started up in her mind, insistent, puerile, melancholy, like that little silvery tinkling.