"
"It is not a wretched place," Regina answered. "It is clean, and the
things are new, and the curtains have been washed. It is not wretched.
We have been in worse lodgings when we have travelled and stopped in
small towns. Professor Kalmon has been very kind. It was wise to bring
me here."
He wished she had seemed discontented.
"Have you rested a little?" he asked.
"I have slept two or three hours. And you? You look tired."
"I have had no time to sleep. I shall sleep to-night."
He leaned back in the small green arm-chair and rested his head against
a coarse netted antimacassar. His eyes caught Regina's, but she was
looking down thoughtfully at her hands, which lay in her lap together
but not clasped. Peasant women often do that; their hands are resting
then, after hard work, and they are thinking of nothing.
"Look at me," Marcello said after a long time.
Her glance was sad and almost dull, and there was no light in her face.
She had made up her mind that something dreadful was going to happen to
her, and that the end was coming soon. She could not have told why she
felt it, and that made it worse. Her eyes had the indescribable look
that one sees in those of a beautiful sick animal, the painful
expression of an unintelligent suffering which the creature cannot
understand. Regina, roused to act and face to face with danger, was
brave, clever, and quick, but under the mysterious oppression of her
forebodings she was the Roman hill woman, apathetic, hopeless,
unconsciously fatalistic and sleepily miserable.
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