“To accomplish my duty,” he affirmed, with veiled insistence.
“If it is a duty, yes,” she consented coldly.
The door was closed on them. By the brightness of the electric light Maria discovered a bunch of flowers in the pocket in front of her.
“Are they yours?” she asked.
“No, I wouldn’t allow myself,” he murmured, with a smile. “They are Emilio’s; he has thought of everything. For several days he has busied himself with nothing but your return.”
“You busy yourselves together, it seems to me,” she said, with a fleeting tinge of irony.
“If you like. Emilio considers me, perhaps unworthily, one of the authors of your return. Is he wrong?”
“He is wrong,” she replied precisely.
A silence fell between them. In spite of his wit and scepticism Gianni Provana always felt the distance at which the woman held him, and the confused repugnance, a repugnance sometimes cruelly apparent, with which he inspired her.
“Because of this false idea of his, then,” resumed Provana, “Emilio wished to organise your return with me.”