"Am I unworthy of your confidence?"
"I can't tell it to you, I can't. It's too horrible," she murmured, with so heart-broken an inflection that he was silent, fearing lest others should witness her emotion.
He returned to the subject later on, but without result. Anna appeared horror-struck by her own thoughts and feelings. Luigi had numberless suspicions. Had Anna secretly come to love him? Or, had she fallen in love with some one else, some one unknown to him? But he soon saw that neither of these suppositions were tenable. He saw that she had not for a moment ceased to love Cesare Dias, and that her grief, whatever it was, sprang as usual from her love for him.
For the first week after his return her husband had been kind and tender to her; then, little by little, he had resumed his old indifference. He constantly neglected her. He went out perpetually with Laura, on the pretext that she was too old now to be accompanied only by her governess, and that it was his duty to find a husband for her. Sometimes Anna went with them, to enjoy her husband's presence.
Often he and Laura would joke together about this question of her marriage.
"How many suitors have you?" asked Cesare, laughing.
"Four who have declared themselves; three or four others who are a little uncertain."
Anna felt herself excluded from their intimacy, and sought in vain to enter it. It made her exceedingly unhappy.
She was jealous of her sister, and she hated herself for her jealousy.