'Is the Contessa here?' said Eleanor, looking at the woman with the strained and startled air that was becoming habitual to her, as though each morsel of passing news only served somehow to make life's burden heavier.
But certainly the Contessa was here! She and Donna Teresa were always at the Villa. Once they used to go to Rome and Florence part of the year, but now—no more!
A sudden uproar arose from below—of crying children and barking dogs. The woman threw up her hands. 'What are they doing to me with the baby?' she cried, and disappeared.
Lucy went back to fetch the carpet-chair. She caught up also a couple of Florentine silk blankets that were among their wraps. She laid them on the bricks of the loggia, found a rickety table in Eleanor's room, her travelling-bag, and a shawl.
'Don't take such trouble about me!' said Eleanor, almost piteously, as Lucy established her comfortably in the chair, with a shawl over her knees and a book or two beside her.
Lucy with a soft little laugh stooped and kissed her.
'Now I must go and dry Marie's tears. Then I shall dive downstairs and discover the kitchen. They say they've got a cook, and the dinner'll soon be ready. Isn't that lovely? And I'm sure the cart'll be here directly. It's the most beautiful place I ever saw in my life!' said Lucy, clasping her hands a moment in a gesture familiar to her, and turning towards the great prospect of mountain, wood, and river. 'And it's so strange—so strange! It's like another Italy! Why, these woods—they might be just in a part of Maine I know. You can't see a vineyard—not one. And the air—isn't it fresh? Isn't it lovely? Wouldn't you guess you were three thousand feet up? I just know this—we're going to make you comfortable. I'm going right down now to send that cart back to Orvieto for a lot of things. And you're going to get ever, ever so much better, aren't you? Say you will!'
The girl fell on her knees beside Eleanor, and took the other's thin hands into her own. Her face, thrown back, had lost its gaiety; her mouth quivered.
Eleanor met the girl's tender movement dry-eyed. For the hundredth time that day she asked herself the feverish, torturing question—'Does she love him?'
'Of course I shall get better,' she said lightly, stroking the girl's hair; 'or if not—what matter?'