intimation that she would come back every day, but Nella did not so much
as hint that she ever meant to come back at all.

Zorzi went about on crutches, swinging his helpless foot as he walked,
for it still hurt him when he put it to the ground. He was pale and
thin, both from pain and from living shut up almost all day in the close
atmosphere of the laboratory. For a change, he began to come out into
the little garden, sometimes walking up and down on his crutches for a
few minutes, and then sitting down to rest on the bench under the
plane-tree, where Marietta had so often sat. Pasquale came and talked
with him sometimes, but Zorzi never went to the porter's lodge.

He felt that if he got as far as that he should inevitably open the door
and look up at Marietta's window, and he would not do it, for he was
hurt by her apparent indifference, after having allowed him to hold her
hand in his. She had not even asked through Nella what had become of the
beautiful glass. What he pretended to say to himself was that it would
be very wrong to go and stand outside the glass-house, where the porter
would certainly see him, and where he might be seen by any one else,
staring at the window of his master's daughter's room on the other side
of the canal. But what he really felt was that Marietta had treated him
capriciously and that if he had a particle of self-respect he must show
her that he did not care. For if Marietta was very like other carefully
brought up girls of her age, Zorzi was nothing more than a boy where
love was concerned, and like many boys who have struggled for existence
in a more or less corrupt world, he had heard much more of the
faithlessness and caprices of women in general than of the sensitiveness
and delicate timidity of innocent young girls.

Marietta was his perfect ideal, the most exquisite, the most beautiful
and the most lovable creature ever endowed with form and sent into the
world by the powers of good. He believed all this in his heart, with the
certainty of absolute knowledge. But he was quite incapable of
discerning the motives of her conduct towards him, and when he tried to
understand them, it was not his heart that felt, but his reason that
argued, having very little knowledge and no experience at all to help
it; and since his erring reason demonstrated something that offended his
self-esteem, his heart was hurt and nursed a foolish, small resentment
against what he truly loved better than