The voice called again, and more impatiently: “Teresa!”
She opened the book and tore out the leaf with uncertain fingers. As he took it his hand met hers. He bent his head and touched it with his lips. She flushed deeply, then turned and ran through the naked trees toward the villa shielded in its cypress rows.
The girl ran breathlessly to the terrace, where a lady leaned from a window with a gently chiding tongue:
“Do they teach you to do wholly without sleep in convents?” she cried. “Do you not know your father and Count Guiccioli, your lord and master to be, are to arrive to-day from Ravenna? You will be wilted before the evening.”
The girl entered the house.
Under the olive wood a man, strangely moved, a rustling paper still in his hand, walked back with quick strides to his gondola, striving to exorcise a chuckling fiend within him, who, with mocking and malignant emphasis, kept repeating:
“Oh blessed Virgin, Queen of the most holy Rosary! Intercede and obtain for me, of Thy Son our Lord, this grace!”
CHAPTER XXVI
A WOMAN OF FIRE AND DREAMS
From the moment those lips touched her hand in that meeting at the wood shrine Teresa Gamba felt her life unfold to rose-veined visions.
Her unmothered childhood and the placid convent school years at Bagnacavallo, near Ravenna, had known no mystery other than her day-dreams had fashioned. She had dreamed much: of the time when she should marry and redeem the fortunes of her house, which, despite untainted blood and ancient provincial name, was impoverished; of the freedom of Italy, the sole topic, aside from his endless chemical experiments, of which her father, now growing feeble, never tired; of her elder brother, away in Wallachia, secretary to the Greek Prince Mavrocordato; of the few books she read, and the fewer people she met. But these dreams had not possessed the charm of novelty. Even when, at eighteen, through family friendship, she became a member of the Albrizzi household and exchanged the dull convent walls for the garlanded La Mira—even with those rare days when she saw the gay splendor of Venice from a curtained gondola—even then her mental life suffered small change.