“Oh, not at all,” she assured him. She was swathed in a blue linen apron of Marietta’s and had tied a cotton handkerchief over her hair. “I like to feel I am doing something for you,” she said. “I wish—you have been—you are so kind.”
On the Wednesday morning she covered some of the books with brown paper and pasted labels on their backs. She tried not to listen for the creaking of the great gates as they swung open, for the grating of wheels against the stones, for Jean’s voice calling to his brother, for his quick step upon the stair, but she heard all as she wrote Vita Nuova on the slip intended for an early edition of the Rape of the Lock, and put the Decameron aside with some sermons and commentaries that were to be classified as devotional literature. He did not come to her then, but she was desperately afraid that he might. “I am not ready ... not ...”
When, later, she came into the dining-room she seemed to be perfectly at her ease. Jean’s eyes had been fixed on the door, and they met hers eagerly as she came forward. “Are you better?” he asked, and then bit his lip, thinking he had said the wrong thing.
“Oh, yes. But—but you look pale and thinner.”
Her little air of gay indifference fell away from her. As he still held her hand she felt the tears coming and longed to be able to run upstairs and take some more sal volatile, but Hilaire came to the rescue.
“Well, let’s have lunch,” he said. “I hate tepid food.”
When they had taken their places Jean gave the girl a letter.
“It came for you to the Lorenzoni. I called at the porter’s lodge this morning and Ser Gigia gave it me.”
“Such a waste of good things I never saw,” the butler said afterwards to his wife. “As you know, the padrone never eats more than enough to fill a bird, but I have seen the signorino hungry, and the young lady too. To-day, however, they ate nothing, though the frittata was fit to melt in one’s mouth. I should not have been ashamed to set it before the Archangel Gabriel, and he would have eaten it, since it is certain that the Blessed One has never been in love.”
After the meal, to which no one indeed had done justice, Hilaire explained that he was going to write some letters.