“I am glad I came in time,” she continued. “A few days and the words will show no longer. I shall not need them then,” she went on, her face tinted. “I shall know them by heart. As soon as I read the first lines, I knew they were yours—that you had been here.”
“I am stopping at Bologna,” he told her.
“Ah, Madonna!” she said under her breath. “And you have been so near Ravenna!”
“Better it were a hundred leagues!” he exclaimed. “And yet—distant or near, it is the same. I think of you, Teresa! That is my punishment. Every day, as I have ridden through the pines, every hour as I have sat on this hill—and that has been often—I have thought of you!”
“I knew that”—she was gazing past him to the river and the far dusky amethyst of the hills—“when I read what is on the fungus.”
Thereafter neither spoke for a moment. A noisy cicala droned from a near chestnut bough, and from somewhere down the slope came the brooding coo of a wood-dove. At length he said:
“There were tears on your cheek when I first saw you. They were not for the verses, I know.”
She shook her head slowly. “It was something”—she could not tell him all the truth—“something I saw in that.” She pointed to the German magazine.
He reached and retrieved it, but she put her hand on his restrainingly.
“Is it about me?”