"Entrate," she said quickly, welcoming any fresh voice which would divert her mind from the weary longing for her mother.A sort of wild hope sprung up within her that some woman friend would be sent to her, that Gladys Farrant, or old Mrs.Osmond, or her secularist friend Mrs.MacNaughton, whom she loved best of all, would suddenly find themselves in Florence and come to her in her need.
There entered a tall, overworked waiter.He looked first at her, then at the note in his hand, spelling out the direction with a puzzled face.
"Mess Rabi Rabi Rabi Rabi an?" he asked hesitatingly.
"Grazie," she replied, almost snatching it from him.The color rushed to her cheeks as she saw the writing was Brian's, and the instant the waiter had closed the door she tore open the envelope with trembling hands.
It was a last appeal, written after he had returned from wandering among the Apennines, worn out in body and shaken from the noble fortitude of the morning.The strong passionate words woke an answering thrill in Erica's heart.He asked her to think it all over once more, he had gone away too hastily.If she could change her mind, could see any possible hope for the future, would she write to him? If he heard nothing from her, he would understand what the silence meant.This was in brief the substance of the letter, but the words had a passionate, unrestrained intensity which showed they had been written by a man of strong nature overwrought by suffering and excitement.
He was here, in the very hotel.Might she not write to him? Might she not send him some sort of message write just a word of indefinite hope which would comfort and relieve herself as well as him? "If I do not hear from you, I shall understand what your silence means." Ah! But would he understand? What had she said this morning to him? Scarcely anything the merest broken bits of sentences, the poorest, coldest confession of love.
Her writing case lay open on the table beside the bed with an unfinished letter to Aunt Jean, begun before they had started for Fiesole.She snatched up paper and pen, and trembling so much that she could scarcely support herself she wrote two brief lines.
"Darling, I love you, and always must love you, first and best."Then she lay back again exhausted, looking at the poor little weak words which would not contain a thousandth part of the love in heart.Yet, though the words were true, would they perhaps convey a wrong meaning to him? Ought she to send them? On the other hand would he indeed understand the silence the silence which seemed now intolerable to her? She folded the note and directed it, the tumult in her heart growing wilder as she did so.Once more there raged the battle which she had fought in the amphitheatre that morning, and she was not so strong now; she was weakened by physical pain, and to endure was far harder.It seemed to her that her whole life would be unbearable if she did not send him that message.And to send it was so fatally easy; she had merely to ring, and then in a few minutes the note would be in his hands.
It was a little narrow slip of a room; all her life long she could vividly recall it.The single bed pushed close to the wall, the writing table with its gay-patterned cloth, the hanging wardrobe with glass doors, the walls trellised with roses, and on the ceiling a painting of some white swans eternally swimming in an ultra-marine lake.The window, unshuttered, but veiled by muslin curtains, looked out upon the Arno; from her bed she could see the lights on the further bank.On the wall close beside her was a little round wooden projection.If it had been a rattlesnake she could not have gazed at it more fixedly.Then she looked at the printed card above, and the words written in French and English, German, and Italian, seemed to fall mechanically on her brain, though burning thoughts seethed there, too.
