"Well--perhaps, just a little," replied Sterzl, with a smile, "but I must admit that the temptation was a strong one."
"And really and truly I am very sorry for you," Siegburg went on, with that ingenuous want of tact that never lost him a friend. "There is nothing in the world so odious as to have a posse of disagreeable relations who suddenly appear and cling on to your coat-tails. I know it by experience. Last spring, at Vienna, half a dozen old aunts of my mother's came down upon us from Bukowina like a snow-storm...." Sempaly meanwhile had buttoned himself into his fur-lined coat and said nothing.
CHAPTER III.
The three days have gone by in which Truyn had desired his cousin to make up his mind--three days since the sudden descent of Baroness Wolnitzka scared away the sweet vision that till then had dwelt in Sempaly's soul and checked the declaration actually on his lips--but he has not yet requested to be removed from Rome. Truyn's eye has been upon him all through these three days, has constantly met his own with grave questioning, as though to say: "Have you decided?"
No, he had not decided. To a man like Sempaly there is nothing in the world so difficult as a decision; fate decides for him--he for himself! Never.
His encounter with the preposterous baroness might silence the avowal he was on the verge of uttering, but it was not so powerful as to banish Zinka's image once and for all from his mind. The silly old woman's chatter he had by this time forgotten; the Stornelli that Zinka had been singing still rang in his ears. For two days he had had the resolution to avoid the Palazetto, but he had seen Zinka for a moment, by accident, yesterday on the Corso. She was in the carriage with Marie Vulpini--she had on a grey velvet dress and a broad-brimmed mousquetaire hat that threw a shadow on her forehead and her golden-brown hair; she held a large bouquet of flowers and was chatting merrily with the little Vulpinis and Gabrielle Truyn; what pretty merry ways she had with children! His blood fired in his veins as their eyes met, and she blushed as she returned his bow. It was the first time she had blushed at seeing him. All that night he dreamed the wildest dreams,--and now he was taking a solitary early walk in the spring sunshine, on the Pincio, lost in thought, but snapping the twigs as he passed along to vent his irritation. More and more he felt that marriage with Zinka was a sine qua non of his existence. He had never in his life denied himself a pleasure, and now....
The brilliant March sun flooded the Piazza di Spagna, the waters of the Baracaccia sparkled and danced, reflecting the radiant blue sky, against which the towers of the Trinita dei Monti stood out sharp and clear. All over the shallow steps of the church models were lounging in the regulation peasant costumes, and blind beggars incessantly muttering their prayers. In front of the Hotel de l'Europe the cab-drivers were sweetly slumbering under the huge patched umbrellas stuck up behind their coach-boxes for protection against the sun or rain. Flower-sellers were squatted on every door-step, and here and there sat a brown-eyed, snub-nosed white Pomeranian dog. The Piazza was swarming with tourists, and Beatrice di Cenci gazed with the saddest eyes in the world out of a photographer's shop at the motley crowd and bustle.
Siegburg, in happy unconsciousness of coming evil, had just come out of Law's, the money changer's, and was inhaling with peculiar satisfaction the delicious pervading scent of hyacinths, when his eye was accidentally attracted by the fine figure of a young English woman who passed him in a closely fitting jersey. He was still watching her when a harsh voice close to him exclaimed:
"Good morning, Count,--what luck!"