'We are just starting for Vicomile. Delfina is in raptures.
'It is the festival of Our Lady of the Rosary. Courage, my heart!
'_October 4th._--I found no courage.
'Yesterday was so full of trifling incidents and great emotions, so
joyful and so sad, so strangely agitating that I am almost at a loss
when I try to remember it all. And yet all--all other recollections pale
and vanish before the one.
'After having visited the tower and admired the monstrance, we prepared
to return home at about half-past five. Francesca was tired and
preferred going back in the coach to getting on horseback again. We
followed them for a while, riding behind or beside them, while Delfina
and Muriella waved long flowering bulrushes at us, laughing and
threatening us with their splendid spears.
'The evening was calm, not a breath of wind stirred. The sun was sinking
behind the hill at Rovigliano in a sky all rosy-red, like a sunset in
the Far East.
'When we came in sight of the pine-wood, he suddenly said to me: "Shall
we ride through it?"
'The high road skirted the wood, describing a wide curve, at one part of
which it almost touched the sea-shore. The wood was already growing dark
and was full of deep-green twilight, but under the trees the pools
gleamed with a pure and intense light, like fragments of a sky far
fairer than the one above our heads.
Pages:
196
197
198
199
200
201
202
203
204
205
206
207
208
209
210
211
212
213
214
215
216
217
218
219
220