The Italian Girl [antikvár]

I I. A Moonlight Engraving I pressed the door gently. It had always been left open at night in the old days. When I became quite certain that it was locked, I stepped back into the moonlight and looked up at the house. Although it was barely midnight, there was not a Hght showing. They were all abed and asleep. I felt a resentment against them. I had expected a vigil, for her, and for me. I moved through a soft tide of groundsel and small thistles to try the two front casements, but they were both firm and a greater blackness breathed at me from within. Calling out or throwing stones at windows in such a silence, these were abhorrent things. Yet to wait quietly in the Ught of the moon, a solitary excluded man, an intruder, this was abhorrent too. I walked a little, with dewy steps, and my shadow, thin and darkest blue, detached itself from the bixlk of the house and stealthily followed. At the side it was all dark too and protected by such a dense jungle of ash saplings and young elder trees that it would have been impossible to reach a window, even had there been one unlatched. I measured, by the growth of these rank neglected plants, how long it was since I had last been in the north: it must be all of six years. It had been foohsh, entirely foolish, to come. I ought to have come earlier when she was ill, earlier when she wanted me and wrote in letters which for anger and guilt I could scarcely bear to read, come, come, come. To have come then would have made sense in the light of the last abstract IP It a Ki:':-^' i -li/ m'-'B ^{(V Hi I p i kill Vi ii hi m vr I ^i'/il i ¦¦! ¦ f 'P i' i;. < - ;1 'Ml i