She seemed to carry in her heart the last
breath of memories already faded, the last trace of joys departed for
ever, the last tremor of a happiness that was dead--something akin to a
mist from out of which images emerge fitfully without shape or name. She
knew not, was it pleasure or pain, but by degrees this mysterious
agitation, this nameless disquiet waxed greater and filled her soul with
joy and bitterness.
She was silent--withdrawn within herself--for though her heart was full
to overflowing, her emotion was pleasurably increased by that silence.
Speech would have broken the charm.
The kettle began its low song.
Andrea on a low seat, with his elbow on his knee and his chin in his
hand, sat watching the fair woman so intently that Elena, without
turning, felt that persistent gaze upon her with a sense of physical
discomfort. And while he gazed upon her he thought to himself that she
seemed altogether a new woman to him--one who had never been his, whom
he had never clasped to his heart.
And in truth, she was even more desirable than in the former days, the
plastic enigma of her beauty more obscure and more enthralling. Her head
with the low broad forehead straight nose and arched eyebrows--so pure
and firm in outline, so classically antique in the modelling--might have
come from some Syracusan coin. The expression of the eyes and that of
the mouth were in singular contrast, giving her that passionate,
ambiguous, almost preternatural look that only one or two master-hands,
deeply imbued in all the profoundest corruption of art, have been able
to infuse into such immortal types of woman as the Mona Lisa and Nelly
O'Brien.
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