Then with a long sigh, she rose, and feebly made her way to the loggia.
Her maid was waiting for her. But Eleanor refused her sofa. She would sit, looking out through the arches of the loggia, to the road, and the mountains.
'Miss Foster is a long time,' she said to Marie. 'It is too hot for her to be out. And how odd! There is the Contessa's carriage—and the Contessa herself—at this time of day. Run, Marie! Tell her I shall be delighted to see her. And bring another comfortable chair—there's a dear.'
The Contessa mounted the stone stairs with the heavy masculine step that was characteristic of her.
'Vous permettez, madame!'—she said, standing in the doorway—'at this unseasonable hour.'
Eleanor made her welcome. The portly Contessa seated herself with an involuntary gesture of fatigue.
'What have you been doing?' said Eleanor. 'If you have been helping the harvesters, je proteste!'
She laid her hand laughingly on the Contessa's knee. It seemed to her that the Contessa knew far more of the doings and affairs of her contadini than did the rather magnificent fattore of the estate. She was in and out among them perpetually. She quarrelled with them and hectored them; she had as good a command of the local dialect as they had; and an eye that pounced on cheating like an osprey on a fish. Nevertheless, as she threw in yet another evident trifle—that she cared more for them and their interests than for anything else in the world, now that her son was gone—they endured her rule, and were not actively ungrateful for her benefits. And, in her own view at any rate, there is no more that any rich person can ask of any poor one till another age of the world shall dawn.
She received Eleanor's remark with an embarrassed air.
'I have been doctoring an ox,' she said, bluntly, as though apologising for herself. 'It was taken ill last night, and they sent for me.'