"A cabinet-meeting?"
"Yes," he answered, sinking into the Abbess's high carved chair.
He glanced musingly about the dim room, in which the shadow of the
cloister made an early dusk. Its atmosphere of monastic calm, of which
the significance did not escape him, fell soothingly on his spirit. It
simplified his relation to Fulvia by tacitly restricting it within the
bounds of a tranquil tenderness. Any other setting would have seemed
less in harmony with their fate.
Better, perhaps, than Fulvia, he knew what ailed them both. Happiness
had come to them, but it had come too late; it had come tinged with
disloyalty to their early ideals; it had come when delay and
disillusionment had imperceptibly weakened the springs of passion. For
it is the saddest thing about sorrow that it deadens the capacity for
happiness; and to Fulvia and Odo the joy they had renounced had returned
with an exile's alien face.
Seeing that he remained silent, she rose and lit the shaded lamp on the
table. He watched her as she moved across the room. Her step had lost
none of its flowing grace, of that harmonious impetus which years ago
had drawn his boyish fancy in its wake. As she bent above the lamp, the
circle of light threw her face into relief against the deepening shadows
of the room. She had changed, indeed, but as those change in whom the
springs of life are clear and abundant: it was a development rather than
a diminution. The old purity of outline remained; and deep below the
surface, but still visible sometimes to his lessening insight, the old
girlish spirit, radiant, tender and impetuous, stirred for a moment in
her eyes.
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