"Yes, don't you want to buy something?"
He was testing her, testing her memory. She looked at him above her fork, from which the macaroni streamed down.
"I am content without anything, signorino," she said.
"Without the blue dress and the ear-rings, longer than that?" He measured imaginary ear-rings in the air. "Have you forgotten, Maddalena?"
She blushed and bent over her plate. She had not forgotten. All the day since she rose at dawn she had been thinking of Maurice's old promise. But she did not know that he remembered it, and his remembrance of it came to her now as a lovely surprise. He bent his head down nearer to her.
"When they are all at the auction, we will go to buy the blue dress and the ear-rings," he almost whispered. "We will go by ourselves. Shall we?"
"Si, signore."
Her voice was very small and her cheeks still held their flush. She glanced, with eyes that were unusually conscious, to right and left of her, to see if the neighbors had noticed their colloquy. And that look of consciousness made Maurice suddenly understand that this limit which he had put to his sinning—so he had called it with a sort of angry mental sincerity, summoned, perhaps, to match the tremendous sincerity of his wife which he was meeting with a lie to-day—his sinning against Hermione was also a limit to something else. Had he not sinned against Maddalena, sinned when he had kissed her, when he had shown her that he delighted to be with her? Was he not sinning now when he promised to buy for her the most beautiful things of the fair? For a moment he thought to himself that his fault against Maddalena was more grave, more unforgivable than his fault against Hermione. But then a sudden anger that was like a storm, against his own condemnation of himself, swept through him. He had come out to-day to be recklessly happy, and here he was giving himself up to gloom, to absurd self-torture. Where was his natural careless temperament? To-day his soul was full of shadows, like the soul of a man going to meet a doom.
"Where's the wine?" he called to Gaspare. "Wine, cameriere, wine!"
"You must not drink wine with the pasta, signorino!" cried Gaspare. "Only afterwards, with the vitello."