t of her. And he said something, frightened, in Italian.

"Is it you? Why are you in the darkness?" he said.

"I am just going upstairs again."

"You frightened me."

She went up to finish the preparing of the meal. Ciccio came down to
Pancrazio. The latter had brought a newspaper. The two men sat on
the settle, with the lamp between them, reading and talking the
news.

Ciccio's group was called up for the following week, as he had said.
The departure hung over them like a doom. Those were perhaps the
worst days of all: the days of the impending departure. Neither of
them spoke about it.

But the night before he left she could bear the silence no more.

"You will come back, won't you?" she said, as he sat motionless in
his chair in the bedroom. It was a hot, luminous night. There was
still a late scent of orange blossom from the garden, the
nightingale was shaking the air with his sound. At times other,
honey scents wafted from the hills.

"You will come back?" she insisted.

"Who knows?" he replied.

"If you make up your mind to come back, you will come back. We have
our fate in our hands," she said.

He smiled slowly.

"You think so?" he said.

"I know it. If you don't come back it will be because you don't want
to--no other reason. It won't be because you can't. It will be
because you don't want to."

"Who told you so?" he asked, with the same cruel smile.

"I know it," she said.

"All right," he answered.

But he still sat with his hands abandoned between his knees.

"So make up your mind," she said.

He sat motionless for a long while: while she undressed and brushed
her hair and went to bed. And still he sat there unmoving, like a
corpse. It was like having some unnatural, doomed, unbearable
presence in the room. She blew out the light, that she need not see
him. But in the darkness it was worse.

At last he stirred--he rose. He came hesitating across to her.

"I'll come back, Allaye," he said quietly. "Be damned to them all."
She heard unspeakable pain in his voice.

"To whom?" she said, sitting up.

He did not answer, but put his arms round her.

"I'll come back, and we'll go to America," he said.

"You'll come back to me," she whispered, in an ecstasy of pain and
relief. It was not her affair, where they should go, so long as he
really returned to her.

"I'll come back," he said.

"Sure?" she whispered, straining him to her.

***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE L