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Peasant folk coming from Albano or the olive-grounds between it and the villa would take a short cut through the garden to Marinata; dark-faced gardeners, in blue linen suits, would doff their peaked hats to the strange lady; or a score or two of young black-frocked priestlings from a neighbouring seminary would suddenly throng its paths, playing mild girlish games, with infinite clamour and chatter, running races as far and fast as their black petticoats would allow, twisting their long overcoats and red sashes meanwhile round a battered old noseless bust that stood for Domitian at the end of a long ilex-avenue, and was the butt for all the slings and arrows of the day, poor helpless State, blinded and buffeted by the Church!
Then two men Lucy recognised one as the Marinata doctor and another nurse; then Alfredo, with luggage. They passed rapidly out of her sight. But the front door was immediately below the balcony, and her ear could more or less follow the departure. And there was Mrs. Burgoyne, leaning over the balcony. Mr. Manisty spoke to her from below.
As she stood there before him in her white dress under the twilight, he had a vision of her lying with shut eyes in his chair at Marinata; he remembered the first wild impulse that had bade him gather her, unconscious and helpless, in his arms. He moved away from her. For something to do, or say, he stooped down to look into her open workbasket. 'Isn't that one of the Nemi terra-cottas!
Yet as this passed across Lucy's mind, she felt again upon her face the cool morning wind, as she and Eleanor fled down the Marinata hill in the early sunlight, between six and seven o'clock, through the streets of Albano, already full and busy, along the edge of that strange green crater of Aricia, looking up to Pio Nono's great viaduct, and so to Cecchina, the railway station in the plain.
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