"He is certainly very handsome," she agreed. "And—Patapouf? I like his name. I will not think too ill of him if he will promise never again to try to catch a—a fringuello. I don't remember the English for fringuello?"
Her glance and her inflection conveyed a request to be reminded.
But Anthony shook his head.
"And I shall at once proceed to forget it. Fringuello is so much prettier."
Susanna gave a light little trill of laughter.
"What a delicious laugh," thought he that heard it.
And, laughing, "But before it has quite gone from you, do, pray, for my instruction, just pronounce it once," she pleaded.
"How extraordinarily becoming to her that mantilla is," he thought. "How it sets off her hair and her complexion—how it brings out the sparkle of her eyes."
Her fine black hair, curling softly about her brow, and rippling away, under the soft black lace, in loose abundance; her warm, clear complexion; the texture of her skin, firm and smooth, with tiny blue veins faintly showing at the temples; her sparkling, spirited dark eyes, their merriment, their alertness, their graver underglow; the spirited, high carriage of her head; that dark-blue, simple, appropriate frock; and then her figure, upright, nervous, energetic, with its fluent lines, with its fragrance of youth and of womanhood,—oh, he was acutely conscious of them, he was thrilled by his deep sense of their nearness to him, alone there, in the wide sunny circle of green landscape, in the seclusion of that unfrequented hour.
"The word comes back to me dimly," he said, "as—as something like finch."