Fiammetta di Foscone became infected by our nervousness. At one moment her mirth was feverish; at another, a look of vague uneasiness crossed her face. Was our secret gradually penetrating to her subconscious mind? Was she to learn the fact, and perish of it, not because of bungling word or action on our part, but merely from the unwitting transmission of our thoughts?
The others redoubled their travesty of merriment. They voiced the gossip of a vanished society; the politics, fashions, and scandals of old Florence. One heard the names of noble families long since extinct, accounts of historic escapades related as if they had happened yesterday. Fiammetta recovered her animation.
Her dewy eyes turned to Antonio. Her fingers caressed her betrothal-ring, which was like the wedding-ring of the twentieth century. And in this hall tricked out with lies, amid these guests and servants who were the embodiment of falsehood, an oppressing atmosphere of dread was clarified, for a moment, by the strength and delicacy of her love.
They discussed the virtues of the Muses, the plagiarisms of Petrarch, the wonders of astrology. Her uneasiness revived. In a voice more musical than the rota in the gallery, she asked:
"My dear friends, would you attribute to some planetary influence a feeling of strangeness that I receive at times, even from the air? I demand of you whether the air does not have an unfamiliar smell to-night?"
There was a freezing moment of silence.
"It is this great wind," muttered Leonardo, "that has brought us new air from afar."
"Every place has its smell," was Leonello's contribution. "It is natural that the Castle of Manzecca should smell differently from the Castle of Foscone."
Antonio thanked his friends with an eloquent look.
"True," she assented, pensively, "every spot, every person, is surrounded by its especial ether, produced by its peculiar activity. This house, not only in its smell, but in its tenor of life, and even in its food, differs vastly from my own house, which, nevertheless, is just across the hills."