"What then?"
"He is a fine man. I think you could hear an echo to the love you cherished for Martel, if you but listened."
Vittoria gazed at her foster-sister with a look half tender and half stern. Her voice had lost some of its languid indifference when she replied:
"Any feeling I might have would indeed be no more than an echo. I—am not like other women; something in me is dead—it is the power to love as women love. I am like a person who emerges from a conflagration, blinded; the eyes are there, but the sight is gone."
"Perhaps you only sleep, like the princess who waited for a kiss—"
Vittoria interrupted impatiently: "No, no! And you mistake his feelings. I attract him, perhaps, but he loves Miss Warren and has asked her to marry him. What is more, she adores him and—they were made for each other."
"She adores him!" echoed the other. "Che Dio! She only plays at love.
Her affections are as shifting as the winds."
"That may be. But he is in earnest. It was he who gave her this social triumph—he made her Queen of the Carnival. He even bought her dresses. It was that which caused her to send for me this afternoon. Heaven knows I was in no mood to listen, but she chattered like a magpie. As if I could advise her wisely!"
"She is very dear to you," Oliveta ventured.
"Indeed, yes. She shares with you all the love that is left in me."