It was not so simple as they had thought, this waiting. Wishing to be as unnoticed as mice, they felt more conspicuous than camels. Bianca’s little yellow dog, Pallina, who had refused absolutely to stay behind, had the vile habit of yapping at passers; cracks and cuffs would not subdue her. The persons barked at naturally turned to look.
Half a dozen times footsteps were heard, or imagined, on the stairs farther within. The girls each time hurried out of the way, and, against their habit, afraid of everybody, walked along the house fronts the length of the gardens, then back, to ensconce themselves again, very uneasy as to what the guard of public safety had thought, half expecting him to darken the doorway suddenly and question them. Oh, it was an evening to remember like some painful nightmare! Camilla, in spite of all, never lost sight of their reason for being there.
Now she seized Bianca’s arm. Giulio was coming out, with a party—the boy of earlier in the day, and two young girls dressed exactly alike, the cousins, very likely; behind them came a middle-aged gentleman and lady.
“The grandmother must be getting well,” said Camilla through her teeth, “seeing that they can laugh like that!”
“We will say,” she arranged with Bianca on the way home, “that while we stood at the door taking the air, Maria Nutini and her mother passed, and we joined them for a turn. They left us at the corner.”
Every time Bianca was wakened that night, she saw Camilla writing. Once tears were falling upon the paper. Ordered to keep still, Bianca sorrowfully relapsed into her healthy young sleep.
In the morning Camilla posted her letter. If it fell into his mother’s hands, so much the worse for him.
To live on, days, months, years, with that burden of love turned back upon the heart, like a dammed-in torrent, how could it be endured? What, what did one do to destroy the spell by which another got this dreadful power to fill one’s every thought, made himself master over the motions of one’s blood? For Camilla, in her outraged pride, desired not to love Giulio any more.
The hours of suspense were so intolerable that more than once she wished she never had been born. She had calculated the earliest at which she might expect an answer. She allowed not an hour more before writing him again. And then she waited with confidence, knowing positively that she should see him.
In this second waiting she had the first glimmering notion that she might feel better by and by, that the burning sense of ignominy attached to feeling oneself trampled and disdained might be turned to victorious gladness by making the other, the dear enemy, feel himself more trampled, more disdained.