"They are descending to Italy," murmured Lucio.
"I envy them," she said, as if to herself.
"You ought not to envy anyone, dear," he repeated ardently. "Wherever Lilian is, there is the country; because there is love."
Like music, now tender and now violent, his words, even vague, even imprecise, even indefinite to the questions she often asked him, were like the music of softness and passion; his words caressed her with a fresh breeze or ate into her heart like tongues of flame. For a moment she closed her eyes and forgot that she had received no reply to her question; she closed her eyes and allowed herself to be destroyed by that flame.
People were coming and going before the Hospice; the horses had been taken out of three or four carriages to be fed and watered before resuming the journey to Italy; also there were carts and carters. Everyone, travellers, coachmen, carters, and hotel servants, were in winter costume, and stamping their feet on the ground against the cold. The deep grey of the hotel, which had been a Hospice for travellers, and the brown, clear waters of the motionless lakes beneath the snows and glaciers of the Cambrena, the Carale, the Sassal Masone, and, further away, the yoke of the Bernina, behind which the road descended suddenly to Italy—all had the cold and sad aspect of a winter landscape in the high mountains, without a tree or flower.
"Would you stay a month here with me?" Lucio asked Lilian at the door of the hotel.
"Yes, certainly," she replied at once, with that peculiar certainty of hers.
"Let us pretend that it is the first day," he whispered into her ear, "that we are bridegroom and bride on our honeymoon."
Again she became pale; again he felt too strong an emotion preventing his self-control. Profoundly disturbed they passed along the narrow, almost gloomy corridor which divided the rooms of the Hospice, and penetrated the little reading-room, which they found invaded by a little caravan of Germans, men and women, while the room was full of smoke from the pipes the men were smoking. To avoid all this they went into the vast dining-room, and around them hovered a waiter and waitress, to ask if they were staying for the afternoon, the night, or a week. Lucio only replied now and then with a vague smile, holding Lilian's hand in his, more than ever enamoured, like a bridegroom. She was silent and absorbed; the waiter and the waitress left them by one of the windows of the room, where already those who wanted luncheon were arriving. Behind the panes Lilian and Lucio exchanged some rare words of childish, sentimental intimacy, rather vibrant, and pronounced softly, with an indescribable accent, and they gazed at, perhaps without seeing, the lofty Cambrena, black with rocks and white with ice, and the four little lakes which almost seemed to advance from the back of the valley and surround the grey Hospice, with their waters of such strangely different hues.
"Are you still cold, adored little Lilian?"