At bottom her coldness was not displeasing to Anania, and only augmented his ardour. Often seeing her so beautiful and so frozen, her eyes shining in the moonlight like the pearl eyes of an idol, he dared not kiss her. He gazed at her in silence, and his breast heaved with felicity or with anguish he knew not which. Once he said-- "Margherita, I feel like a beggar on the threshold of a wondrous palace given him by a fairy into which he dares not enter." "God be praised, the sea is calm," said the priest, Anania's fellow-traveller. The young man started from his memories and looked at the gold-green sea, which in the dusk suggested a moonlit plain, at the ruins of a little church, at a path through the thickets, lost on the extreme verge of the shore, as if traced by a dreamer who had hoped to carry it on across the velvet ripples of the sea. He thought of Chateaubriand's Renato, and fancied he saw that melancholy figure on a rock which overhung the waves. "No, it's not Renato. Perhaps its Eudorus, who on the sea rocks of wild Gallia dreamed of the flowers in his distant Hellas. No, it is not Eudorus; it's just a poet thinking--" "'This granite rock supreme above the sea What does it here?'" But the rock and the church and the path and the silhouette of the uncertain personage have all disappeared. Strange questions are still, however, troublesome in Anania's mind, falling without answer like stones thrown into the sea. Why should he not stop on this wild, gently melancholy coast? Why should not the half seen figure on the rocks be his own? Why not build a house on the ruins of that church? Why waste himself in this stupid sentimentality? Why was he going to Rome? why studying Law? Who was he? What was life? Nostalgia? Love? What was Margherita doing? Why did he love her? Why was his father a mere servant? Why had his father told him to visit, the moment he got to Rome, those places where gold coins were kept which had been found among the ruins? Was his father a criminal or only a monomaniac? Had he inherited monomania from his father? Monomania in a different form? Was it monomania, a mental disease, this continual thinking of his mother, of that woman? And was she really in Rome, and would he find her? "'Anninia,'"[14] said the drawling tones of the mocking student from Campidano, using the nickname which Anania's companions had fastened on him, "are you asleep? Wake up! Life's just this, a circular ticket giving the right to stop longer or shorter time at definite places. At least give thanks that sea-sickness won't interrupt your love dreams." The priest, who was young and narrow-minded, also had his gibe. "Don't be so gloomy, man. '_There's trout even in hell_.' We are leaving our beloved fatherland, but at least we shan't be sea-sick!"