Her unpleasant expression exasperated Regina almost to fits. She was not laughing at the fireman, but at something else, unknown, mysterious and terrible. Suddenly Regina turned and tried to strike her, but the _signorina_ started backwards and Regina tumbled down. The shock of this fall wakened the dreamer, whose first conscious thought was of the fireman priest with the silk flounces. In the dream this detail had disgusted her horribly, and the disgust remained for long hours. Sleep had deserted her. It was still night, but already across the deep silence which precedes the dawn came the earliest sounds of the quiet country life--a tinkling of tiny bells trembling on the banks of the streams, going always farther and farther away. The silvery, insistent, childish note seemed to Regina the voice of infinite melancholy. A thousand memories started up in her mind, insistent, puerile, melancholy, like that little silvery tinkling. "My whole life has been useless," she thought, "and now, now, just when I might have found an object, I have flung it away like a rag! But what object could I have had?" she asked herself presently. "Well, family life is supposed to be an object. Everything is relative. The good wife who makes a good family contributes no less than the worker or the moralist to the perfection of society. I have never made anything but dreams. I remember the dream I had the second night after our arrival. I thought Madame Makuline had given me a castle." Just then she heard a faint rustle, and something like a scarce perceptible but tender groan emitted by some minute dreaming creature. "It's the swallow! Does it also dream? Do birds think and dream? I expect they do. Why, I wonder, is this one all alone? And _he_!" She felt a sudden movement of joy, thinking that this day the letter from Antonio would surely come! The hours passed. Post hour came, but there was no post. Regina went out of doors to hide her agitation, to forget, to flee from the extravagant fears which assailed her. As on the preceding day, she wandered in the woods and lanes, by the river-side, upon which beat the full rays of the sun. Everywhere fear followed her like her shadow. "He has not forgiven me. He will not write. In his place I would do the same. He wants to punish me by his silence, or he is coming to take me back by force. A wife has to follow her husband, otherwise he can demand a legal separation. What would become of me if he did that?" Pride would not allow her to confess that if Antonio insisted on her return she would go to him at once merely to be forgiven. But as the slow hours rolled on her pride weakened. Memory assailed her with consuming tenderness. She sickened at the thought of passing her life's best years deprived of love.