The intelligence baffles him, as he had not at all expected it. Probably his disconcertment is written not illegibly on his features, as Annunziata begins at once to inform him that the signore are gone to drive in the Cascine, and that she expects them back every moment. It is a good while before he quite masters her glib explanation, his Italian being still at that stage when, if the careful phrase-book question does not receive exactly the phrase-book answer, the questioner is at fault. But the smiling invitation of the amiable ugly face, and the hospitably open door—so different a reception from what the old bull-dog of an English nurse would have accorded him—need no interpreter. After a moment's hesitation he enters. He will wait for them.
It is not until he has been left alone for a quarter of an hour in the little salon that he has time to ask himself nervously whether the amount of his acquaintance with them, or the importance of the tidings he brings, justifies his thus thrusting himself upon their evening privacy. The table—since they have obviously but one sitting-room—is spread for their simple supper—a coarse white cloth, a wicker-covered bottle of rough Chian wine, and a copper pot full of delicately odorous Freesias. He wanders restlessly about the room, looking at the photographs.
Tom—can it be Tom?—with a moustache, Charles with a beard and a bowie-knife, Rose dandling her baby, Miriam hanging over her new husband—all his little playfellows! How far the wave of time has rolled them away from him! He strolls to the window whence, at sunset, the green shutters have been thrown back, and stares out at the Piazza garden, where the twilight is taking all the colour out of the Judas flowers, thence to the piano upon which Schubert's "Trockne Blumen" stands open. Absently he repeats aloud the song's joyous words:
"Der Lenz wird kommen, der Winter ist aus!"
Is her "Winter aus"? Judging by the look in her eyes, it has been a long and cruel one. If he wishes to put the question to her, she comes in just in time to answer it—enters laggingly, as one tired, blinking a little from the sudden crude lamplight after the soft feather-handed dusk. She is evidently unprepared to find anyone in the room, and gives a frightened jump when she sees a man's figure approaching her. Even when she recognises him the scared look lingers. It is clear that in her sad experience surprises have been always synonymous with bad news. The white apprehension written on her small face makes him so cordially repent of his intrusion, that his explanation of his presence is at first perfectly unintelligible.
"I hope you will excuse my taking such a liberty. I know that I had no business to come in when I was told you were out," he says incoherently, "but—I thought—I hoped—I had an idea—that you might be glad to hear——"
He stops, puzzled how to word his piece of intelligence, whether or not to name the person whose presence, whose very existence had yesterday seemed to inspire with such terror the woman before him. She has sunk down upon a chair, holding her hat, which she had taken off on entering the room, nervously clutched in her hands, the little waves of her hair, straightened out by the night wind, invading her forehead more than their wont and giving her an unfamiliar look.
"To hear what?" asks Mrs. Le Marchant, who, following her daughter more leisurely, has come in just in time to catch the last few words of Burgoyne's speech dissevered from their context. He begins that speech again, still more stammeringly than before.
"I thought you might be glad to hear that the—the inquiries you asked me—I mean that I promised to make—that the person relating to whom I—I made inquiries, leaves Florence to-morrow."
He hears a long sighing breath that may mean relief that may mean only distress at the introduction of the subject, from the chair beside him, while the elder woman says in a low abrupt voice: