Lucy shook her head.
'You must get better,' she said in a low, determined voice. 'And it must all come right.'
Eleanor was silent. In her own heart she knew more finally, more irrevocably every hour that for her it would never come right. But how say to Lucy that her whole being hung now—not on any hope for herself, but on the fierce resolve that there should be none for Manisty?
Lucy gave a long sigh, rose to her feet, and went off to household duties.
Eleanor was left alone. Her eyes, bright with fever, fixed themselves, unseeing, on the sunset sky, and the blue, unfamiliar peaks beneath it.
Cheerful sounds of rioting children and loud-voiced housewives came from below. Presently there was a distant sound of wheels, and the carro from Orvieto appeared, escorted by the whole village, who watched its unpacking with copious comment on each article, and a perpetual scuffling for places in the front line of observation. Even the padre parroco and the doctor paused as they passed along the road, and Lucy as she flitted about caught sight of the smiling young priest, in his flat broad-brimmed hat and caped soutane, side by side with the meditative and gloomy countenance of the doctor, who stood with his legs apart, smoking like a chimney.
But Lucy had no time to watch the crowd. She was directing the men with the carro where to place the cooking-stove that had been brought from Orvieto, in the dark and half-ruinous kitchen on the lower floor of the convent; marvelling the while at the risotto and the pollo that the local artist, their new cook, the sister of the farmer's wife, was engaged in producing, out of apparently nothing in the way either of fire or tools. She was conferring with Cecco the little manservant, who, with less polish than Alfredo, but with a like good-will, was running hither and thither, intent only on pleasing his ladies, and on somehow finding enough spoons and forks to lay a dinner-table with; or she was alternately comforting and laughing at Marie, who was for the moment convinced that Italy was pure and simple Hades, and Torre Amiata the lowest gulf thereof.
Thus—under the soft, fresh evening—the whole forlorn and ruinous building was once more alive with noise and gaiety, with the tread of men carrying packages, with the fun of skirmishing children, with the cries of the cook and Cecco, with Lucy's stumbling yet sweet Italian.
Eleanor only was alone—but how terribly alone!
She sat where Lucy had left her—motionless—her hands hanging listlessly. She had been always thin, but in the last few weeks she had become a shadow. Her dress had lost its old perfection, though its carelessness was still the carelessness of instinctive grace, of a woman who could not throw on a shawl or a garden-hat without a natural trick of hand, that held even through despair and grief. The delicacy and emaciation of the face had now gone far beyond the bounds of beauty. It spoke of disease, and drew the pity of the passer-by.