Chapter Sixteen.
“Traitors Die Slowly.”
They had returned to the hotel, and Armytage had dined with her, but the meal had been a very dismal one. Gemma, with woman’s instinct, knew that she looked horribly untidy, and that her eyes betrayed unmistakable signs of recent tears, therefore she was glad when the meal concluded, and she could escape from the staring crowd of diners.
From her lover’s manner, it was also plain that, notwithstanding his protestations of blind affection in Leghorn, he had suddenly awakened to the fact that some deep mystery lay behind her, and that he was disinclined to carry their acquaintance much further without some explanation. Time after time, as she sat opposite him at the table, she had watched him narrowly, looking into his dark, serious eyes in silence, and trying to divine his thoughts. She wondered whether, if he left her, his love for her would be sufficient to cause him to return to her side. Or had he met, as she once feared he would, some other woman—a woman of his own people; a woman, perhaps, that he had loved long ago? This thought sank deeply into her mind. As she watched him and listened to his low, jerky speech, it seemed plain to her that she had guessed the truth. He had grown tired of her, and was making her enforced silence an excuse for parting. When this thought crossed her mind, her bright, clear eyes grew luminous with unshed tears.
He told her that to meet next morning was impossible, as he had business to transact. This she knew to be a shallow excuse, as only that morning he had told her that his time was completely at her disposal. Yes, there was no disguising the truth that he had grown weary of her, and now meant to discard her. Yet she loved him.
When an Italian woman loves, it is with a fierce, uncontrollable passion, not with that too often sickly admiration for a man’s good looks which is so characteristic of love among the more northern nations. In no country is love so ardent, so passionate, so enduring, as in the sunny garden of Europe. The Italian woman is slow to develop affection, or even to flirt with the sterner sex; but when she loves, it is with all the strength of her being; she is the devoted slave of her lover, and is his for life, for death. Neither the strength of Italian affection nor the bitterness of Italian jealousy can be understood in England, unless by those who have lived among the hot-blooded Tuscans in that country where the sparkle of dark eyes electrify, and where the knives are cheap, and do their work swiftly and well.
They passed out of the table d’hôte room into the hall. Then he stretched forth his hand.
“You are not coming to see me to-morrow, Nino?” she asked in a low, despondent voice.