With a sudden courage she took one of his hands and placed it on her heart.
“Listen, Carlo, there are three of us.”
He rose suddenly, agitated, embraced her, and kissed her a hundred times on the eyes, cheeks, hair, mouth, everywhere, interrupting his kisses with sighs of joy.
“Thanks, thanks, my adored one.”
They continued to be happy, and to call themselves so, without fear that God would know it, consider them in contravention, and murmur in their ears:
You will be prosecuted.
⁂
They had not seen each other for eight days! He had been obliged to leave her alone on account of urgent business.
Eight days—that is eight centuries! He had written eight times, she ten, for on one day which seemed longer than the others she had written three times, in the three different languages she knew.