But not a word passed her lips. She began again to try and unravel the meaning of his letter. Why had he gone in search of them to the Abruzzi of all places?
Then, suddenly, she remembered.
One day at the villa, some Italian friends—a deputy and his wife—had described to them a summer spent in a wild nook of the Abruzzi. The young husband had possessed a fine gift of phrase. The mingled savagery and innocence of the people; the vast untrodden woods of chestnut and beech; the slowly advancing civilisation; the new railway line that seemed to the peasants a living and hostile thing, a kind of greedy fire-monster, carrying away their potatoes to market and their sons to the army; the contrasts of the old and new Italy; the joys of summer on the heights, of an unbroken Italian sunshine steeping a fresh and almost northern air: he had drawn it all, with the facility of the Italian, the broken, impressionist strokes of the modern. Why must Italians nowadays always rush north, to the lakes, or Switzerland or the Tyrol? Here in their own land, in the Abruzzi, and further south, in the Volscian and Calabrian mountains, were cool heights waiting to be explored, the savour of a primitive life, the traces of old cities, old strongholds, old faiths, a peasant world moreover, unknown to most Italians of the west and north, to be observed, to be made friends with.
They had all listened in fascination. Lucy especially. The thought of scenes so rarely seen, so little visited, existing so near to them, in this old old Italy, seemed to touch the girl's imagination—to mingle as it were a breath from her own New World with the land of the Cæsars.
'One can ride everywhere?' she had asked, looking up at the traveller.
'Everywhere, mademoiselle.'
'I shall come,' she had said, drawing pencil circles on a bit of paper before her, with pleased intent eyes, like one planning.
And the Italian, amused by her enthusiasm, had given her a list of places where accommodation could be got, where hotels of a simple sort were beginning to develop, whence this new land that was so old could be explored by the stranger.
And Manisty had stood by, smoking and looking down at the girl's graceful head, and the charming hand that was writing down the names.
Another pang of the past recalled,—a fresh one added!