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"Then you dream, too?" she asked. "Every night of you." "We are both dreaming now! I am sure of it. I shall wake up in the dark and hear the door shut softly, though I always lock it now." "The door? Do you hear that, too?" asked Lamberti. "But I am wide awake when I hear it." "So am I! Sometimes I can manage to turn up the electric light before the sound has quite stopped. Are we both mad?
By ten o'clock Guido was comfortably installed in a long cane chair, amongst his engravings and pictures, very pale and thin, but cheerful and expectant. As he had no fever, and was quite calm, Lamberti told him frankly that Cecilia had something to say to him which no one could say for her, and was coming herself.
"Yes, really. Lamberti does not count, for we generally dine together when we have no other engagement." The shadow again flitted across Cecilia's brow, and she said nothing, only nodding quickly. Then she looked across the room at her mother. Young girls are always instantly aware that their mothers are making signs.
It was all a vile trick meant to save his feelings and help him to get well, and she hated and despised it. She was playing a part with Lamberti, too, and that was no better. She had fallen low enough to love a man who did not care a straw for her, and it needed all the energy of character she had left to keep him from finding it out. Nothing could be more contemptible.
Cecilia Palladio was very much ashamed of having uttered a cry of terror at the sight of Lamberti, and still more of having run away from him like a frightened child. To him it seemed as if she had really shrieked with fear, whereas she fancied that she had scarcely found voice enough to utter an incoherent exclamation.
Lamberti had burned the papers before his eyes after telling him how Princess Anatolie had died, and had read him the paragraph which Baron Goldbirn had caused to be inserted in the Figaro. The Princess was dead, and Monsieur Leroy would probably never trouble any one again. When he had squandered what she had left him, he would probably get a living as a medium in Vienna.
But as they passed the bench, they glanced at it quietly, and saw that it was still in its place. Cecilia had not been at the villa since the afternoon before Guido fell ill, and Lamberti had never come there since the garden party in May. They stood still before the low wall and looked across the shoulder of the hill. Saving commonplace words at meeting, they had not spoken yet.
Lamberti had spent a less pleasant evening, and was not prepared for the agreeable surprise that awaited him on the following morning in Guido's note.
Therefore, when Lamberti reached his friend's door, he had the receipts in his pocket and he now meant to tell Guido what had happened, after first giving them back to him. Guido would laugh at Monsieur Leroy's stupid attempt to hurt him. But some one had been before Lamberti. "He is very ill," said the servant, gravely, as he admitted him. "The doctor is there and has sent for a nurse.
He remembered that he had once dragged himself five miles with a bad spear-wound in his leg, to take news to a handful of men in danger, but he supposed that Guido was differently organised. He did not like him the less. "No!" Guido answered. "The fever makes me so giddy that I can hardly stand." He put out his hand for the tumbler on the table, but it was empty. "Lamberti!" he said.
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