The Signora Gemma,
who roused in me an electric kind of melancholy, clasped her hands
together in ecstasy as the door swiftly shut itself.
'_Ecco!_' she cried, in her vibrating, almost warlike woman's voice:
'_Ecco!_'
Her eyes were aflame as they looked at the door. She ran forward to try
it herself. She opened the door expectantly, eagerly. Pouf!--it shut
with a bang.
'_Ecco!_' she cried, her voice quivering like bronze, overwrought but
triumphant.
I must try also. I opened the door. Pouf! It shut with a bang. We all
exclaimed with joy.
Then the Signor di Paoli turned to me, with a gracious, bland, formal
grin. He turned his back slightly on the woman, and stood holding his
chin, his strange horse-mouth grinning almost pompously at me. It was an
affair of gentlemen. His wife disappeared as if dismissed. Then the
padrone broke into cordial motion. We must drink.
He would show me the estate. I had already seen the house. We went out
by the glass doors on the left, into the domestic courtyard.
It was lower than the gardens round it, and the sunshine came through
the trellised arches on to the flagstones, where the grass grew fine and
green in the cracks, and all was deserted and spacious and still.
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