Lucio Sabini's step became slower as he withdrew into the wood. Suddenly the shining light of the sun amidst the high branches seemed colourless to him, and feeble the twittering of the little birds among the bushes, and languishing the flight of the white butterflies amidst the fragrant clumps of wild mint and dark wild vanilla. His heart contracted with sorrow for the strange lady, Clara Howath, whose name alone he knew, whose deep grief, breathed forth from her soul, made her no longer recognise either the shame of tears or womanly reserve, to such an extent as to tell all her misery to a stranger in a public road, amongst strange people passing and staring. He would have liked to have been the other; he who was not dead but whom the deserted woman had lost for ever. He would have liked to have been the other, so far-off and forgetful, the traitor who had perjured himself and forgotten; so that he might return to the wood, where the azure of the firmament and the blue of the lake peeped amidst the trees, to take that unhappy woman in his arms and kiss away her tears.
Drawing farther away he was once more Lucio Sabini, and the visions seen that morning were already settling in his imagination; but still more feverishly within him became the need of the unknown love, of the unknown lady whom he had come to seek amongst the mountains, of the woman whom he should love an hour, a day, a month, and whom he should never see again, who perhaps might love him for a summer evening or a summer morning: but an unknown woman of another land and another race.
Up above, in a remote corner of the wood, he halted and sat down on a tree trunk, which perhaps had been struck down by lightning in an autumnal storm, or perhaps had been transported from the heights of Corvatsch by the fury of the torrent in winter. The trunk lay there amongst the tall grass and rocks, the little violas with yellow eyes, and tall and slender marguerites. Lucio sat down and drew from his coat pocket a lady's purse which he had found the day before, towards dusk, at the Dorf, in a solitary lane close to the tennis-courts. It was a smallish purse of chain silver, with a broad encircling silver hinge adorned with three large turquoises; a silver chain kept it suspended through two rings. For the fourth time Lucio opened the lady's purse, and again examined its contents, minutely and curiously. First of all there was a little handkerchief of white cambric, adorned with a fine embroidery of white flowers, and in the corner was a tiny initial—an "L." From the cambric a subtle and feverish perfume exhaled: every time as Lucio placed it to his nostrils he had a sense of delight. He repeated the gesture, and again he had the same sensation. The purse also contained, slipped through a gold ring, some charms in silver and gold: a medal for a good journey with a figure of St. Christopher; a golden olive, harbinger of peace; a little bluish-green scarab; another medal with just a name inscribed and nothing else—Lilian; and a small hand on which were engraved some oriental figures. One by one Lucio for the fourth time passed these small jewels in review, turning and returning them between his fingers, seeking to discover something fresh. Then he set himself to study the last object which that feminine purse contained.
The last object, the most mysterious and important, was a little pocket-book of dark blue leather, closed by a slender silver pencil. Inside, on the first page, was stuck down a four-leaved clover, a little shamrock that had been sought for and found in the fields, and after being dried, had been pasted on the first leaf, and underneath it in fine letters, firm and long, was the name—ever that name—Lilian. Many of the pages of the pocket-book were covered with lines of writing, sometimes in ink, sometimes in pencil. They seemed to be notes thrown there according to the day and the state of the soul. Without stirring from his ruined tree trunk, the dark bark of which was peeling, with his feet amidst the deep grass and woodland flowers, Lucio re-read page for page what the unknown Lilian had written in the pocket-book. A date in English on a page, a date which went back two years, to December, and still in English, Portia's exclamation in The Merchant of Venice: "The world is too heavy for my little body." Further, still in English, a singular phrase: "One must wait in hope and faith. Someone will come: surely he will come." Then, in a medley, the name of a French or German woman, with some address in Paris or Vienna. On another page, another character, still feminine, had written in English a farewell: "Dear, dearest Lilian, don't forget me; I won't forget you," with a signature—Ethel. Lucio Sabini read on with immense attention, examining the phrases, words, and letters, seeking to divine even more than they said and showed. In French, on another page, again in the writing of the mysterious one, were two questions: "Must one live to love? Must one die to love?" And at last on the penultimate page, in a scrawling writing, like a child that is striving to write something he does not understand, in almost round letters, was a verse of Dante's, copied with an orthographical error: "Amor che a cor gentil ratto si apprende."
Each time at these words so vibrant with love's emotion which the unknown woman's hand had copied letter for letter, which surely she must have understood or someone have explained to her; at these words of the poet Lucio Sabini trembled, charmed as he was by brief loves encompassed by poesy, because of their mystery and their brevity.
Now there came the last page, where in haste the woman had written in pencil in French: "How high and close to heaven are the mountains! I should like to return here in winter, to the highest mountain, amidst the whitest and purest snow...."
There was nothing else. Mechanically Lucio closed the book, replacing the slender silver pencil. He replaced, too, the little cambric kerchief, the charms, and the little book in the purse, thereby stretching the clasp to close it. For some time, as he pursued his fantasy, he dreamed of her who had lost that purse, and he saw in his dream the figures of many ladies who surprised him and looked at him, who smiled and beckoned to him to follow them, and each of them, it seemed to him, might be the unknown Lilian; now dark and handsome, now slender as a reed, now with eyes sky-blue and smiling, now with eyes black and languishing.
Suddenly in the air the Dorf clock, blue with gilded hours, struck ponderously and harmoniously half-past eleven. The sound spread itself along the lake and in the woods. Lucio Sabini burst into laughter at his dream and at himself. Perhaps—in fact surely—she who had lost the purse so full of poetical matter, and bore the floral name of Lilian, might be an English old maid, angular, with pince-nez. Lucio laughed at himself and his dream, which melted in the clear air of that heavenly morning.