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.

“What is the matter?” Marcello asked.  “What has happened?”

“I shall know when you have told me,” Regina answered, slowly shaking her head; and again she looked down at her hands.

“What I have come to tell you will not make you sad,” Marcello replied.

“Speak, heart of my heart.  I listen.”

Marcello leaned forward and laid his hand upon hers.  She looked up quietly, for it was a familiar action of his.

“I am going to marry you,” he said, watching her, and speaking earnestly.

She kept her eyes on his, but she shook her head again, slowly, from side to side, and her lips were pressed together.

“Yes, I am,” said Marcello, with a little pressure of his hand to emphasise the words.

But she withdrew hers, and leaned far back from him.

“Never,” she said.  “I have told you so, many times.”

“Not if I tell you that nothing else will make me happy?” he asked.

“If I still made you happy, you would not talk of marriage,” Regina answered.

For the first time since she had loved him he heard a ring of bitterness in her voice.  They had reached that first node of misunderstanding in the love relations of men and women, which lies where the one begins to think and act upon a principle while the other still feels and acts from the heart.

“That is not reasonable,” Marcello said.

“It is truth,” she answered.

“But how?”

“How!  I feel it, here!”

Her hands sprang to life and pressed her bosom, her voice rang deep and her eyes flashed, as if she were impatient of his misunderstanding.