"Oh, why didn't I think of all this before?" she asked herself. And she remembered she had thought of it, but so vaguely, so lightly, that her faint fears had not held her back from folly. In an opposing sense she reasoned thus. "It's my character made up of discontent and contradiction which tosses me hither and thither like a wave of the sea. Why have I changed so soon? If I go back to Rome I shall be sorry immediately that I didn't carry out my project, which is perhaps better than I am now thinking it. Perhaps after all he thinks it reasonable, and is delaying to write that I may see he accepts it. Oh! there's a bit of four-leaved clover! Yes; that's what it is. He accepts my plan." She stooped, but did not pick the four-leaved clover. What luck could it bring to her? She felt hurt and saddened by the idea that Antonio was not broken-hearted; that he would not try by all means in his power to get her back; would not reproach, punish, coax her, move her to agonies of despair and love. "He has not written. He isn't going to write," she said again. "He will come himself to-morrow, or the next day, at the first moment he can. What shall I say when I see him?" And in the joy of renewed confidence she forgot everything else. * * * * * He neither wrote nor came. The days went by; the slow, cruel hours passed in a waiting increasingly apprehensive. Regina wondered at the presentiment she had felt from the very moment of her arrival--the presentiment that her husband would write to her no more. Yet still she waited. She perceived that her mother, observant of Antonio's silence, was watching her with those beautiful serene eyes now disturbed and unquiet. So one morning she feigned to have met the postman and brought back a letter. She came into the house, an envelope in her hand, crying-- "He's not well! He's laid up with fever!" The mother was opening a silvery fish from the Po, and she looked at her daughter, scarcely raising her eyes from her work. Regina saw that her mother was not deceived, and that wistful maternal glance agitated her to the very depths of her soul. And the silver fish, in whose inside was discovered another little black fish, reminded her of Antonio's promise-- "We will go out together in a boat. We will fish together in the beautiful red evenings----" and of all the torturing tenderness of that last afternoon they had spent together. She went to her room and wrote him a letter. Pride would not let her set down her real thoughts; but between the lines he might read all her stinging anxiety, her fear, her penitence. He did not reply. Suppose he were really ill? Regina thought of writing to Arduina, but quickly felt ashamed of the idea. No. _All those people_ whom Antonio's unfortunate notion had thrust between her and him on the first days of her arrival--all those people, the prime cause, perhaps, of their present misery, were repugnant to her, positively hateful.