And all that day he scorched and froze with the
thought that perhaps she had been laughing at him.
Cantapresto was torpid after the feast, and Odo detected in him an air
of guilty constraint. The boy was glad enough to keep silence, and they
rolled on without speaking through the wide glowing landscape. Already
the nearness of a great city began to make itself felt. The bright
champaign was scattered over with farm-houses, their red-tiled
pigeon-cots and their granges latticed with openwork terra-cotta
pleasantly breaking the expanse of maize and mulberry; villages lay
along the banks of the canals intersecting the plain; and the hills
beyond the Po were planted with villas and monasteries.
All the afternoon they drove between umbrageous parks and under the
walls of terraced vineyards. It was a region of delectable shade, with
glimpses here and there of gardens flashing with fountains and villa
roofs decked with statues and vases; and at length, toward sunset, a
bend of the road brought them out on a fair-spreading city, so
flourishing in buildings, so beset with smiling hills, that Odo,
springing from his seat, cried out in sheer joy of the spectacle.
They had still the suburbs to traverse; and darkness was falling when
they entered the gates of Turin. This brought the fresh amazement of
wide lamplit streets, clean and bright as a ball-room, lined with
palaces and filled with well-dressed loungers: officers in the brilliant
Sardinian uniforms, fine gentlemen in French tie-wigs and narrow-sleeved
coats, merchants hurrying home from business, ecclesiastics in
high-swung carriages, and young bloods dashing by in their curricles.
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