"I can't deny that I got a certain emotion in the grey old Cathedral.
For so many generations one's people were baptized there, married
there, buried there. And then how many times must _you_ have
worshipped there, heard holy Mass there. They showed us the relics of
San Guido and the Spina d'Oro, of course, and--well, one is n't made of
wood. I tried to make up my mind in what part of the church you
usually knelt, which prie-dieu was your prie-dieu,--I 'm afraid without
any very notable success. But one felt something like a faint
afterglow of your presence, and it made one's heart beat. Again at the
Palazzo Rosso, under the eyes of all those motionless and silent, dead
and gone Valdeschi, in their armour, in their ruffs and puffs and
periwigs, one could n't be entirely wooden. The servant who showed us
about, an old man who said he had been in the family for I forget how
many hundred years, hailed me as a 'cognate,' having recognized the
name of Craford, and thereupon inducted us into the _appartamenti
segreti_, to exhibit a portrait of my grandsire. Wood itself, I dare
say, must have vibrated a little at that. In the throne-room I was
suddenly caught up and whisked away, back to a rainy afternoon at
Craford; and I walked beside you on the cliffs, and heard your voice,
and rejoiced in the sense of your nearness to me, and in your adorable
beauty, as you breasted the wind, with the sea and the sky for a
background. (Do you remember? Do you remember how keen and sweet the
air was, with the scent of the wild thyme? and how the sand-martins
circled round us?) As we passed through the long, bare, imposing rooms,
something like a shadow of you seemed to flit before us. Or if I
glanced out of one of the tall windows, it seemed as if you had just
passed under them, along the Riva or across the Piazza. As for Isola
Nobile, if I regret that it is n't mine, that is chiefly because I
should be glad to be in a position to offer so very lordly and lovely a
pleasure-house to _you_."
Susanna laughed.