“Let’s go home,” whispered Gemma: “we’ll go together—will you?”
If she had said to him at that instant “Throw yourself in the sea, will you?” he would have been flying headlong into the ocean before she had uttered the last word.
They went together out of the garden and turned homewards, not by the streets of the town, but through the outskirts.
XXVIII
Sanin walked along, at one time by Gemma’s side, at another time a little behind her. He never took his eyes off her and never ceased smiling. She seemed to hasten … seemed to linger. As a matter of fact, they both—he all pale, and she all flushed with emotion—were moving along as in a dream. What they had done together a few instants before—that surrender of each soul to another soul—was so intense, so new, and so moving; so suddenly everything in their lives had been changed and displaced that they could not recover themselves, and were only aware of a whirlwind carrying them along, like the whirlwind on that night, which had almost flung them into each other’s arms. Sanin walked along, and felt that he even looked at Gemma with other eyes; he instantly noted some peculiarities in her walk, in her movements,—and heavens! how infinitely sweet and precious they were to him! And she felt that that was how he was looking at her.
Sanin and she were in love for the first time; all the miracles of first love were working in them. First love is like a revolution; the uniformly regular routine of ordered life is broken down and shattered in one instant; youth mounts the barricade, waves high its bright flag, and whatever awaits it in the future—death or a new life—all alike it goes to meet with ecstatic welcome.
“What’s this? Isn’t that our old friend?” said Sanin, pointing to a muffled-up figure, which hurriedly slipped a little aside as though trying to remain unobserved. In the midst of his abundant happiness he felt a need to talk to Gemma, not of love—that was a settled thing and holy—but of something else.
“Yes, it’s Pantaleone,” Gemma answered gaily and happily. “Most likely he has been following me ever since I left home; all day yesterday he kept watching every movement I made … He guesses!”
“He guesses!” Sanin repeated in ecstasy. What could Gemma have said at which he would not have been in ecstasy?
Then he asked her to tell him in detail all that had passed the day before.