They remembered none of that. This other love, silent, without jests, without songs, without smiles; this turbid and gloomy love resembled a spell-bound spiritual imprisonment, a magical slavery of the senses, and a tyrannous voluptuousness which filled them with madness and deadly intoxication.
Their reason for leaving Rome was never mentioned by them. Perhaps once or twice the woman wished to allude to it, but immediately, pale with anger and jealousy, the man had cried out—“No!”
And he closed her again to his breast, where his heart beat as tumultuously as on the day in which he had nearly seen the hand of Emilio Guasco, her husband, take her hand in the shade and lead her away. Very often such pallor and such fury passed over Marco’s face as to give a greater clearness and heat to the flame of love. Often, too, when she seemed thoughtful and absorbed, and her soul was slipping away from the place and altar of passion he would lean over her, and, seized again by the madness of that day, would embrace her fiercely, and his breath on her forehead seemed as if it wished to devour the thought which was going towards Rome.
She understood at once, and exclaimed passionately—
“No, Marco, no!”
Then Marco would stammer a question brokenly in a monosyllable.
“Mine? Mine?”
“Thine! thine!” she answered, looking at him.
Nothing more. Nothing more than these two words, so monotonous, intense and inexorable. Not another demand, not another reply; not a promise, not an oath. The words of possession: thine and mine. The length of this delirium and the passing of time left no impression on their minds. Others counted their days by their troubles or pleasures, not so Marco and Maria.
Four weeks had fled on a day at the end of July when, one morning, Maria rising from the old-fashioned chair, approached a table, and, taking a pen, dipped it in the ink as if to write. Then she trembled at her act, which drew her back to the fiery circle of her love, and she looked at Marco. He had seen all without showing surprise. Then she heard his voice, that voice of other times, a little tired, a little veiled, letting fall a question almost of politeness, but without any interest in a reply—