Rose shivered and moved back into the house. She could not bear the beauty of the garden any more alone.
The Padrona met her with a letter in her hand. She had had it for two hours, but she could not make up her mind to give it to Rose. “How,” she asked her husband, “am I to slay happiness?--I am not a butcher.”
“Signora,” she said nervously, “here is a little letter--it is doubtless from the Signore. He is perhaps detained--hospitable friends have kept him--” Rose held out her hand for the letter. The Pinsents never made fusses. They didn’t believe in bad things happening, and when they happened they tried to look as if they weren’t bad.
This was the way Rose looked now. She smiled pleasantly at the Padrona, and moved slowly away towards her room with the letter. She would not hurry.
The Padrona gazed compassionately after her. “She is walking over a precipice,” said the Padrona to herself, “as if it were a path in our garden, Poverina!”
It was a very short letter.
“My dear,” Léon wrote in French, “I find I must go to Naples. It will not be for long I leave you, and I have told them all to look after you until my return. Forgive me. Léon.”
After all he could not lie to Rose.
She read his letter three times. The first two times she translated his letter into English, and wondered why Léon had gone to Naples. The third time she read it without translating it, and then she knew everything. She knew everything in all the world.
But she could not quite believe it. The arrogance in her rose up and fought against the truth.