"No, it is not a feast day," she murmured, without adding anything further.
"Are you going to the Catholic church of the Bad?"
"Yes; it is less full of well-known people, of smart people," she murmured, with lowered eyes.
"I imagine, madam, that you will pray for all sinners?" he asked, forcing a smile, to enliven the gloomy conversation.
"I try to," she replied vaguely.
"Then through you I am sure to obtain grace from Heaven," he concluded, with a smile.
The lady glanced at him with her proud, already distant eyes, from which in the past rivers of tears must have flowed, clouding them for ever. Lucio bowed, pressed the hand she offered him, and left her, walking a little more rapidly to get away and leave her in freedom.
"She is a tower of ivory, but so interesting," he thought, as he lightly resumed his way in the soft air.
For an instant, moved by a keen desire to conquer and penetrate that solitary, closed soul, he thought of getting Francis Mornand, who was the fashionable chronicler of the Engadine, to tell him the private history of the Comtesse Marcella de la Ferté Guyon, to lay siege to that heart, and with a complete knowledge of its long agony, to obtain a precious victory there, where no one should again penetrate. That sudden and strange desire of his of conquest over the prisoner who believed in her own freedom fascinated him. But a young woman's face was smiling at him from some distance as she came towards him, and he halted beside a young girl who was climbing towards the Dorf with rapid steps, while her mother, a middle-aged woman, followed more slowly. She was a girl of rare beauty, with large, dark eyes furnished with long, dark lashes, a lovely mouth curved up a little at the corners, like that of a Greek statue of Erigone, and a white complexion over which was suffused a flush of health.
Still, every now and then the eyes became hard, with a scrutinising glance—the mouth closed with a half-mocking and half-disdainful smile, and her whole countenance, that resembled a flower of youth and beauty, seemed a flower laden with poison. Lucio Sabini and Lia Norescu, a young Roumanian, immediately plunged into a lively, gay, and slightly sarcastic conversation, while the mother listened silently, with an air of complacency and indulgence.