“If you will watch the windows, and come in the instant I call you; and if that child will get something on the way to put over her head and shoulders.”
The two stole out of the drawing-rooms with all the merry pleasure of children playing a prank.
“Stop a moment!” the young man said when they reached the sala. “See how this room, almost encircled by brightly-lighted chambers, looks like the old moon in the new moon’s arms. Isn’t it pretty?”
They passed the dining-room, traversed the long western wing, went up a little stair, and found themselves on the roof of a building that had been added to the house and used as a studio for sculptors. A balustrade ran across one side,
and at the side opposite a door entered an upper room of the studio. The two connecting sides, the one toward the west and that next the house, had trellises, over which morning-glory vines were running. A few pots of flowers and a chair or two completed the furniture of the place. Below, the garden and vineyard pressed close against its walls, breathing perfume, and just stirring the evening air with a delicate ripple of water and a whisper of leaves.
Bianca leaned on the balustrade and wished she were alone. The silent beauty was too solemn for talk; and, besides, it was the hour when one remembers the absent. Her companion was too sensitive not to perceive and respect her mood. “Only keep the shawl well about you,” he said, as if in reply to some spoken word, then left her to herself, and paced to and fro at the most distant part of the loggia, drinking in the scene, which would some day flow from his pen-point in glowing words. It seemed not ten minutes when the Signora’s voice was heard across the silence, “Children, come in!”
Both sighed as they left the charmed spot, and had half a mind to disobey the summons. “But, after all, it will only be exchanging one picture for another,” the author said. “And, ecco!”
He pointed to the foot of the little
stair that led from the loggia down to the passage. Adriano stood there in the shade, like a portrait framed in ebony, holding in his hand one of the long-handled brass lamps of Italy, the light from whose three wicks struck upwards over his handsome dark face peering out sharply, but not at first seeing them.
“Strong light and shade will make a picture of anything,” Bianca said. “And there is a companion.”