And out of mere reaction from her weeks of anguish, she believed him, she hoped again. Then he turned to speculate on the voyage to America he must now make, on his first interviews with Greyridge and Uncle Ben.
'Shall I make a good impression? How shall I be received? I am certain you gave your uncle the worst accounts of me.'
'I guess Uncle Ben will judge for himself,' she said, reddening; thankful all the same to remember that among her uncle's reticent, old-fashioned ways none was more marked than his habit of destroying all but an infinitesimal fraction of his letters. 'He read all those speeches of yours, last year. You'll have to think—how you're going to get over it.'
'Well, you have brought me on my knees to Italy,' he said, laughing. 'Must
I now go barefoot to the tomb of Washington?'
She looked at him with a little smile, that showed him once more the Lucy of the villa.
'You do seem to make mistakes, don't you?' she said gently. But then her hand nestled shyly into his; and without words, her heart vowed the true woman's vow to love him and stand by him always, for better for worse, through error and success, through fame or failure. In truth her inexperience had analysed the man to whom she had pledged herself far better than he imagined. Did her love for him indeed rest partly on a secret sense of vocation?—a profound, inarticulate divining of his vast, his illimitable need for such a one as she to love him?
* * * * *
Meanwhile Eleanor and Reggie and Father Benecke waited breakfast on the loggia. They were all under the spell of a common excitement, a common restlessness.
Eleanor had discarded her sofa. She moved about the loggia, now looking down the road, now gathering a bunch of rose-pink oleanders for her white dress. The frou-frou of her soft skirts; her happy agitation; the flush on her cheek;—neither of the men who were her companions ever forgot them afterwards.
Manisty, it appeared, had taken coffee with Father Benecke at six, and had then strolled up the Sassetto path with his cigarette. Lucy had been out since the first church bells. Father Benecke reported his meeting with her on the road.