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It looks like unwarrantable invasion of friendly territory but it's a dodge worth remembering, all the same." He drew the Duchessa's letter from his pocket, and read it again, and again approached it to his face, communing with that ghost of a perfume. "Heavens! how it makes one think of chiffons," he exclaimed. "Thursday Thursday help me to live till Thursday!"
But afterward, when the girl returned to die in the old home, all was forgiven, and only the hatred of her foreign husband, whose cruelty had driven her back to Sicily, remained to rankle in the old Duchessa's wicked heart. No one knew her evil nature better than her son. He entertained a suspicion that he had not conquered her by his recent opposition to her will.
He was a little, unassuming-looking, white haired priest, with a remarkably clever, humorous, kindly face; and he wore a remarkably shabby cassock. The Duchessa's chaplain, Peter supposed. How should it occur to him that this was Cardinal Udeschini? Do they go tramping about the country in the rain, attended by no retinue save a woman and a fourteen-year-old girl?
Then she laughed, and added, "But of course you knew that I would not." "Indeed, yes," he answered. "It never entered my head." "By-the-bye," said old Saracinesca, glancing at the Duchessa's black bonnet and gloved hands, "you must have been just ready to go out when she came we must not keep you.
A lively colour had come into the Duchessa's cheeks; her eyes seemed unusually bright. Her hair was in some disorder, drooping at the sides, and blown over her brow in fine free wavelets. It was dark in the kitchen, save for the firelight, which danced fantastically on the walls and ceiling, and struck a ruddy glow from Marietta's copper pots and pans.
And, indeed, there was nothing of the too-prevalent epicene in the Duchessa's aspect; she was very certainly a woman. "Heavens, how she walks!" he cried in a deep whisper. But then a sudden wave of dejection swept over him. At first he could not account for it.
The man disappeared, and Corona quietly resumed her seat. Donna Tullia was silent for a few moments, attempting to control her anger in an assumption of dignity; but soon she broke out afresh, being rendered very nervous and uncomfortable by the Duchessa's calm manner and apparent indifference to consequences.
She became the absorbing subject of his thoughts, the heroine of his dreams. She became, in fact, the supreme influence of his life." The Duchessa's eyes had not lost their intentness, while he was speaking. Now that he had finished, she looked down at her hands, folded in her lap, and mused for a moment in silence. At last she looked up again.
O'Donovan Florence, from an hotel at Spiaggia. In deference, perhaps, to the cloth of the two ecclesiastics, none of the women were in full evening-dress, and there was no arm-taking when they went in to dinner. The dinner itself was of a simplicity which Peter thought admirable, and which, of course, he attributed to his Duchessa's own good taste.
The Duchessa's voice, clear and cool and crisp-cut, sounded perpetually in his ears; the words she had spoken, the arguments she had urged, repeated and repeated themselves, danced round and round, in his memory. "Ought I to have told her then and there? Shall I go to her and tell her to-morrow?" He tried to think; but he could not think.
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