It was in vain that Signor Canincio pressed her to occupy his piano nobile as the only part of his hostel worthy of her. She insisted on the old rooms, the salon that had been growing shabbier and shabbier in the years of her absence, and which had never been redecorated. There were the same faded cupids flying about the ceiling, where many a crack in the plaster testified to an occasional earthquake; and there was the same shabby paper on the walls. Nothing had been altered, nothing had been removed. Vera went out upon the balcony and looked down at the little town, and the distant ridge where the walls of a monastery rose white against the grey November sky. Everything was the same. She had wanted to come back. It was a morbid fancy, perhaps, like many of her fancies. She knew that she was morbid. She wanted to steep herself in the memories of the time before she was Mario Provana's wife; the time when she knew that he loved her, and was proud of his love.
She walked up and down the room, touching things gently as she passed them, as if those poor old pieces of furniture, with their white paint and worn gilding, were a part of her history. This was the table where she had sat making tea, a slow process, while Mario stood beside her, watching her, as she watched the blue flame under Granny's old silver kettle, the George-the-Second silver that gave a grace to the cheap salon. Lady Felicia had kept her old silver—light and thin with much use—as resolutely as she had kept her diamonds.
"If ever I were forced to part with those poor things of mine I should feel myself no better than the charwoman who comes here to scrub floors," she told Lady Okehampton, and that kind lady, who was taking tea with "poor Lady Felicia," in her London lodgings, had approved a sentiment so worthy of a Disbrowe.
Vera paced the room slowly in the thickening light: sometimes standing by the open window, listening to footsteps on the parade, and the talk of the women from the olive woods, tramping bravely homeward with heavy baskets on their heads, baskets of little black olives for the oil mills that dotted the steep sides of the gorge through which the tempestuous little river went brawling down to the sluggish sea.
And then she went back into the shadows, and slowly, slowly, paced all the length of the room, thinking of those evenings when she had made tea for the Roman financier.
The shadows gathered momentarily and the shapes of all things became vague and dim. There was Granny's sofa, and Granny was sitting there among her silken pillows. She could see the pale, thin face, and the frail figure wrapped in a China crape shawl. The white shawl had always had a ghostly look in a dimly lighted room.
She went over to the sofa and felt the empty corner where Granny used to sit. No, she was not there. The sofa was a bare, hard object, with nothing phantasmal about it. There were no silken cushions. Those amenities had been Lady Felicia's private property, travelling to and fro by petite vitesse. There was no one on the sofa, and that dark form, the tall figure near the tea-table, was nothing but shadow. It vanished as she came near and there was only empty space, with the white table shining in the faint light from the open window.
"Nothing but shadow," she thought, "like my life. There is nothing left of that but shadow."
"How happy I must have been, when I lived in this room, how happy! But I did not know it. How sweetly I used to sleep, and what dear dreams I dreamt. I was only seventeen in our first winter, and I was a good girl. Looking back I cannot remember that I had ever done wrong. I was always obedient to Granny, and I tried hard to please her, and to care for her when she was ill. I always spoke the truth. The truth? Why should I have been afraid of truth in those days? There was no merit in fearless truth. But the difference, the difference!"