She would have liked to strip herself, to strip her baby--to tear from the little soft body, pure as a rosebud, the robes of shame, of prostitution, and take her thus naked on her naked breast, and fly with her, fly, fly----! Fly! The old idea came back; but this time Regina would have wished to fly to some spot far distant from her native province, away beyond the river which never, never, would she cross again! CHAPTER III For more than half-an-hour Regina remained sitting on the bench. People passed, hurrying homewards. The children had come away from the gardens; even Caterina and her nurse must have left. The scent of grass became oppressive; a hot and enervating breath passed through the air. Like plaintive music, that odour of grass, that voluptuous warmth which undulated in the perfumed air, sharpened Regina's memories and emotions. Thoughts, stinging and ungovernable, rolled in waves through her perturbed mind. Only one recollection was insistent; it disappeared and returned, more definite than the others, burning, portentous. It, and it alone, was a revelation, for the other memories, however she might call them up, try to fix and interrogate them, did not suggest to her that which she desired and feared to know. How, she asked herself, could Gabrie have penetrated to the secret? The intuition of an observant mind was not enough, nor the keen vision of two sane and cruel eyes. What manifest sign had appeared to Gabrie? Where had she found out the secret? On Madame's impassive face? Antonio's? Marianna's? Or was it a thing already public? Yet Regina had never even suspected it, nor did she remember the smallest revealing sign. True, a few words, a few phrases, now returned to her memory, taking a significance, which, even in her agitation, she thought must be exaggerated. "Anything is possible," Marianna had once said to her with her bad smile. "The blind see more than those with eyes." Who had said that? She did not remember, but she had certainly heard it in the Princess's drawing-room. Even the blind--could they, did they see? Who could tell? _She_ had not seen, perhaps because, in her foolish confidence, she had never looked. Now she remembered the almost physical disgust which Madame Makuline had caused her the very first time they had met. She remembered Arduina's untidy, depressing little drawing-room, the wet sky, the melancholy night; the little old woman dressed in black, sheltering under a doorway, with her meagre basket of unripe lemons. In the shadow, dense as the blackness of pitch, Antonio's face had become suddenly sad, overcast, mysterious. The Princess's pallid, expressionless face, with its thick, colourless lips, appeared in that depth of shade like a dismal moon floating among the clouds of dream. Who could guess how long the evil woman, the outworn body of a dead star, had been attracting into her fatal orbit, her turbid atmosphere, the