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God’s will he might then get a little sense and education.
    If his father had lived he would have fixed it one way or another; he would have taught him to read the missal by ear and from memory; he would have had him anointed priest so that he could get the annuity.
    Instead of which, he had been left to himself in the courtyard, under the orange trees, to count the buckets of water which Don P.G.’s servant pulled up to water the tubs from Montelupo, and finally forgot the inscriptions on them and the conception of the bottoms of his pockets; forgot that pockets have bottoms.

    Don Pietro Galanti had to restart with the first exercises. He kept the house key and watched him by night. Lorenzo was put on rigid abbé’s regime “rules for ecclesiastics” as Don Pietro called it, and had so impressed the abbé with this set of rules for ecclesiastics that he now kept his eyes on the clock for lessons and meals.
    The house, watched by Don Pietro, took on new aspect. The abbé occasionally went to Cleofe’s room, she was half the time in bed, half in the arm-chair. But he no longer smiled at her or kept his hands in his pockets; he stood mute and looked at her in terror as if my grandfather’s shadow might at any instant appear.
    Sometimes when Cleofe slept he was moved to tears, thinking of his mother nailed inside that box under the ground.
    He felt Cleofe’s death coming, because her breath came so gently, her eyes were sunk, her pallor.
    Cleofe seeing him at her bedside so often and so changed, showed a maternal tenderness for him.
    He blushed, began to shake again, and looked toward the door.
    He felt a new attraction toward Cleofe, and thanks to this feeling he tried to look different. He had a sense of well-being, of self-respect, a sense of being alive, a sense of life, now, a bit late, just as he had learned to walk late.
    He now seemed to see clear inside himself, he had new feelings never known before now. Setting his eyes forward toward death he
seemed to see the limits of life, . . . opening an unknown world, a hidden treasure.
    Now he could even shed tears, not for his bodily aches and pains but for his soul in torment. So that, still seeing his mother’s coffin being lowered into the grave, he was moved by Cleofe’s lips sketching a smile for him.
    What is life anyway if it be not softened by such tenderness for one another?
    To feel that someone cares, as your own mother had, after your mother has gone under the earth.
    To feel the desire to clasp the person loved, until she can no longer breathe, to be wholly united with her body. To take something eternal from her lips which can not be said with words. There it is. One could be happy in this world if the devil didn’t take up arms against you.
    He crossed himself, so that the devil shouldn’t appear and blot out his reason.
    Before summer came, the doctor ordered sea air for Cleofe during the spring and part of July . . . because she had suffered so much, passed a horrible winter always shut in her bedroom.
    The days began to lengthen and Cleofe had been getting up for several weeks. She coughed less; but if she went down into the garden and walked up the stairs afterward she was weighed down with
enervating weakness as if she had climbed a mountain. She broke into light sweat toward nightfall, her cheeks got red and at once a light sleep like a slight torpor obliged her to close her eyes and she would stay in a doze for hours.
    It had been a stiff winter, the grottoes, the river’s high banks, the ravines had been constantly frozen. The water in the ravines and rivers could be seen working along with difficulty under a thick plate of ice, seeming to suffer from want of air.
    It must have been gurgling loudly, whirling strongly, because it shot up at the edge of the ice all foamy. The branches, thistles, dry leaves borne along in the torrents had been caught fast in the freeze, imprisoned as if asleep,