“Is this all that you have to say to me?” she asked, with a sneer.
“Oh! Lucia, be human. True, I have lost all sense, all dignity, but ’tis for love of you. Think how I have suffered in these three days! Despair has nearly driven me to throw myself down from the Ponte della Valle.”
“They who talk of suicide are the last to commit it.”
“But if I love thee, I do not mean to die. Oh! cruel, not one kiss hast thou given me.”
“There are no more kisses for our love,” she replied, oracularly.
In her black attire, with her veil drawn over her face, under the green shade of the curtains, her feet hidden by her long skirt, and her hands by her gloves, without a thread of white on her person, her aspect was most tragic. Andrea shuddered with an acute sense of fear, he felt as if he were being irretrievably ruined by a malignant sorceress. But when she moved and the well-known perfume diffused itself in the circumscribed atmosphere, the painful sensation decreased and was soon gone.
“What is the matter with you?” he said. He had lost heart, and seeing all his projects melt away, found nothing to say to her.
“Nothing.”
“Do you love me?”
“I love you,” was Lucia’s frigid reply.