At her words, most innocent as they are of any intention of producing such an effect, a hot flush of shame rises to his very forehead, as his memory presents to him the successive eras into which these eight good years had divided themselves: six months of headlong boyish passion; six months of cooling fever; and seven years of careless, intermittent, matter-of-course, half-tenderness.
"Through me?" he repeats, with an accent of the deepest self-abasement; "you do not mean to be ironical, dear; you were never such a thing in your life; you could not be if you tried; but if you knew what a sweep you make me feel when you say the sort of thing you have just said!—and so it is all to come to an end, is it? Good as these eight years have been, you have had enough of them? You do not want any more like them?"
She says neither yes nor no. He remains unanswered, unless the faint smile in her weary eyes and about her drooped mouth can count for a reply.
"And all because you have heard some fool say that I was tired of you?"
The tight smile spreads a little wider, and invades her pale cheeks.
"Worse than tired! sick! sick to death!"
She is looking straight before her, at the landscape simmering in the climbing sun, the divine landscape new and young as it was before duomo and bell-tower sprang and towered heavenwards. Why should her gaze dwell any more upon him? She has renounced him, her eyes must fain renounce him too. As he hears her words, as he watches her patient profile, the sole suffering thing in the universal morning joy, a great revulsion of feeling, a great compassion mixed with as large a remorse pours in torrent over his heart. These emotions are so strong that they make him deceive even himself as to their nature. It seems to him as if scales had suddenly fallen from his eyes, showing him how profoundly he prizes the now departing good, telling him that life can neither ask nor give anything better than the undemanding, selfless, boundless love about to withdraw its shelter from him. His arm steals round her waist, and not once does it flash across his mind—as, to his shame be it spoken, it has often flashed before—what a long way it has to steal!
"Am I sick of you, Amelia?"
She makes no effort to release herself. It does him no harm that she should once more rest within his clasp. But she still looks straight before her at lucent Firenze and her olives, and says three times, accompanying each repetition of the word with a sorrowful little head-shake:
"Yes! yes! YES!"