He moaned with terror and stood rigid; awful it seemed to him that she should track him so stealthily and be so near to him in this silence and he never know of her presence.
“Eh, Madonna!” he said.
“Eh, Orsini,” she answered in a thin voice, and at the sound of it he stepped away, till his foot was almost in the lake.
His unwarrantable horror of her increased, as he found that the glowing twilight had confused him; for, whereas at first he had thought she was the same as when he had left her seated by the pool, royal in dress and bearing, he saw now that she was leaning on a stick, that her figure had fallen together, that her face was yellow as a church candle, and that her head was bound with plasters, from the under edge of which her eyes twinkled, small and lurid.
She wore a loose gown of scarlet brocade that hung open on her arms that showed lean and dry; the round bones at her wrist gleamed white under the tight skin, and she wore no rings.
“Madonna, you are ill,” muttered Ormfredo Orsini. He wondered how long he had been wandering in the garden.
“Very ill,” she said. “But talk to me of Rome. You are the only Roman at the Court, Orsini.”
“Madonna, I know nothing of Rome,” he answered, “save our palace there and sundry streets—”
She raised one hand from the stick and clutched his arm.