At the end of a week his face, when upon reaching the school he hurried forward without a word to pull the bell-handle for her, was pale with anguish, and his eyes catching hers expressed urgent reproach. On the morning following he unexpectedly pressed inside the door after her, and pushed it to. They stood alone in the great stone hallway. He was obviously agitated, and her heart had stopped.
“Signorina,” he burst forth, hoarse with the sincerity of his emotion, “what have I done? I wish to know what you have against me. Never do you give me a look, never a smile. You regard me with horror, it is evident. And why? Why? I must find out before I live another day. If I am repulsive to you I had best go and drown myself. Why, tell me, do you act toward me as if I were either invisible or else a little dust in the street? Am I a toad, a reptile, in your eyes?”
Camilla had clenched one hand and pressed it over her heart; she lifted the other to her throat. Giulio was not surprised that a young girl should be terrified in the circumstances to the point of fainting. In this great moment the exhibition of her timidity must not make him timid. Trembling at his own courage, he took her hands, in part to reassure and if necessary support, in part to conquer further. He pressed them with all his strength, and commanded, imploringly, “Look at me in the face, and see whether I am such a monster! See whether you find in my eyes anything but love and by loyalty! Look, I beg, look! Look!” He waited, straining her hands.
Camilla, thus masterfully summoned, slowly lifted her face and looked. Both of them looked volumes.
The next thing, he was gently grasping her head. She averted her lips with unaffected shrinking. He very respectfully kissed her hair. He hoped he knew how a well-brought-up man behaves with a well-brought-up young girl.
A hard parrot voice, coming from above, out of sight, made them both jump. “Who is there?” It was Italia, who, when she had pulled the wire that governed the street-door, was wont to come down from her kitchen and let the visitor in at the door of the first floor. Seeing no one, she was making inquiry.
“It’s Camilla,” was called to her from below. “I am coming. I am resting a minute. Leave the door open.”
The stone-floored echoing hallway where they stood was vast as a royal ballroom. At the farther end, broad, low stairs vanishing upward; on the right, the long wall, unbroken save by one door—the ground floor was reserved by the owner, always absent; at the left, three open arches letting into a court, the bottom of a wide shaft with windows, over which a square of burning blue sky. The pavement of this court was green with the damp of centuries; a stone coping, projecting from the wall, hemmed in enough earth to support a spindling rose-tree.
“I am forced to go away to-morrow,” Giulio, still short-breathed with emotion, whispered spasmodically; “and how can I go without learning my fate from you? I am compelled to visit my married sister and be absent for two eternal weeks. My family is obliged to stay in town through the summer, you know, by my grandmother’s serious illness; but my parents insist that I shall go for the change. I vow I will not! I will disobey, and incur I know not what from their displeasure, unless you promise to answer the letters I shall write you. Do you promise? Viareggio. Poste Restante. I will not compromise you by remaining longer. On the way home make me happy by a glance now and then, when it will not be observed. Farewell, my soul! I am your slave!”
Among the letters to be redirected to Mademoiselle Heller she found his first letter. She answered it there at the school, when she ought to have been practising. In the two weeks of his absence she received about twenty letters, for in the ardor of his passion he sometimes wrote twice a day. The same did she.