“I’m looking forward to a perfect evening, child. Dinner by the fire in the saloto, the companionship of Saint Simon, unexpurgated. And you?”
Anne sighed. “Nothing. I refused a bridge. I wasn’t in the mood.”
Her sad face fretted the old Marchesa. What ailed the girl? She certainly must be love-sick. Had Vittorio lost out after all? Her son, she shrewdly suspected, was remaining in Sicily at Anne’s request, for she had never known him to miss a Florentine spring before. About to invite Anne to join forces for the evening, she changed her mind abruptly. If the child wished to work out her problem in solitude, she herself ought to be the last to prevent her, especially if some good should come out of it for Vittorio.
They continued in silence to the end of the garden, where a postern gate in the pink-tinted wall opened on to the Torrigiani property. As the Marchesa passed through she turned and gazed up into the other’s face. Tall and slim as a jonquil in her yellow crêpe dress, Anne’s hair flamed in the setting sun. The old woman’s eyes looked troubled as they rested upon it.
“My dear, how beautiful you are! I love to look at you! If I were the typical old lady I’d be telling what a beauty I was myself in my palmy days. I don’t seem to know my cues at all. But as a matter of fact, I’m a better looking ruin than I ever was girl! If I were more wily, too, and less wise, I probably wouldn’t urge you quite so heartily, to marry my only son. For there is danger in your beauty, child. But years have taught me to appreciate danger. And I couldn’t be so unkind as to deprive a son of mine of such a precious stimulant.”
With an enigmatic smile she raised herself on tiptoe and pecked daintily at Anne’s chin. The younger woman gathered her impulsively into her arms and squeezed her.
“You delicious old cynic! No wonder Vittorio adores you. I do myself!”
A wistful expression crossed the delicate old face. “Be good to us, my dear,” she whispered. “We need you terribly in our house.” She turned gayly-shawled shoulders, and trotted up the long avenue towards her villa.
Anne gazed after the small figure affectionately. Her absent eyes swept the familiar gardens whose famous boxwood hedges defined the paths with fantastic precision. Here a strange, antediluvian beast, there a gigantic globe, so that to the bird’s-eye view the gardens appeared like an enormous chessboard with pawns at play. In the distance, from behind a mass of towering cypresses, gleamed the villa, its splendid façade flanked by a long flight of marble steps.
Anne closed the gate and walked back through her own simple garden. She was anxious to reach the terrace again before all vestige of the sunset should have disappeared, and she mounted the steps with rapid feet. A cape over her shoulders, she drew a chair up by the balustrade and sat there while the henna-colored hills darkened to purple, then faded into lavender, and a mist rolled up from the valley and curled about the city like a smoking halo. Pretty soon a few lights gradually emerged with the evanescent gleam of a flock of fireflies.