When the old Prince’s servants had lifted him up and carried him into the house, Giovanni and Agnese found themselves face to face on the deserted terrace. Their dark eyes met, and as if this were the most fatal of her missions on this spring morning, she looked straight at him for as long a time as it took the landlady’s cock—which was a descendant of the cock in the house of the high priest Caiaphas, and whose ancestors had been brought to Pisa by the Crusaders—to raise and finish a long crow. Then she turned to follow the others into the house. At that he spoke, standing quite still. “Do not go away,” he said. She stood for a moment, waiting, but did not speak to him. “Do not go away,” he said again, “before you have let me speak to you.”

“I cannot think,” said she, “that you can have anything to say to me.” He stood for a long time, very pale, as if making a great effort to collect his voice, then he spoke in a changed and low voice:

Lo spirito mio, che giá cotanto tempo era stato ch’alla sua presenza non era di stupor tremando affranto sanza degli occhi aver più conoscenza, per occulta virtù che da lei mosse d’antico amor senti la gran potenza.

There was a long and deep silence. She might have been a little statue in the garden, except for the light morning wind playing with and lifting her soft locks.

“I had left you,” he said, speaking altogether like a person in a dream, “and was going away, but I turned back at the door. You were sitting up in the bed. Your face was in the shadow, but the lamp shone on your shoulders and your back. You were naked, for I had torn off your clothes. The bed had green and golden curtains, like my forests in the mountains, and you were like my picture of Daphne, who turns away and is changed into a laurel. And I was standing in the dark. Then the clock struck one. For a year,” he cried, “I have thought of nothing but that one moment.”

Again the two young people stood quite still. Like the marionettes of the night before, they were within stronger hands than their own, and had no idea what was going to happen to them. He spoke again:

Di penter sì mi punse ivi l’ortica che di tutt’altre cose, qual mi torse più nel suo amor, più mi si fe’ nemica. Tanta riconoscenza il cuor mi morse ch’ io caddi vinto. . . .

He stopped because, though he had repeated these lines to himself many times, at the moment he could not remember any more. It was as if he might have dropped down dead, like his old adversary.

She turned again and looked at him, very severely, and yet her face expressed the clearness and calm which the sound of poetry produces in the people who love it. She spoke very slowly to him, in her clear and sweet voice, like a bird’s:

. . . da tema e da vergogna

voglio che tu omai ti disviluppe

e che non parli più com’uom che sogna.

She looked away for a moment, drew a deep breath, and her voice took on more force.

Sappi che il vaso che il serpente ruppe

fu e non è, ma chi n’ha colpa creda

che vendetta di Dio non teme suppe.

With these words she walked away, and though she passed so near to him that he might have held her back by stretching out his hand, he did not move or try to touch her, but stood upon the same spot as if he intended to remain there forever, and followed her with his eyes as she walked up to the house.

Augustus came out of the door at that same moment, and walked up to meet her. Though he was deeply affected by the happenings of the morning, and last of all by the sight of the old Prince, now lying in peace and dignity on a large bed within the inn, his conscience told him that he ought to make an effort to get the message of the old lady to Pisa, and he wanted the girl to help him and guide him there. At the same time he was, now that he understood more of the whole affair which had brought on the morning’s tragedy, shy of approaching her, as one of the principal figures in it, and talking to her of such trivial matters as roads and coaches. She met him, however, as if he had been an old friend whom she was happy to meet again. She took his hand and looked at him. She was changed, like a statute come to life, he thought.

She listened with great interest to all he had to tell her, and was naturally eager to bring the message to her friend as soon as possible. She suggested that they travel together in her phaëton, which would be quicker than his coach. She told him that she would drive it herself.

“My friend,” she said, “let us go away. Let us go to Pisa as quickly as we can. For I am free. I can choose where I will go, I can think of tomorrow. I think that tomorrow is going to be lovely. I can remember that I am seventeen, and that by the mercy of God I have sixty years more to live. I am no more shut up within one hour. God!” she said with a sudden deep shudder, “I cannot remember it now if I try.”

She looked like a young charioteer who is confident of winning his race. It was clear that the idea of speed was at this moment the most attractive of all ideas to her. As they were going into the house she looked back at the terrace.

“We have all been wrong,” she said. “That old man was great and might well have been loved. While he was alive we wished for his death, but now that he is dead I think that we all wish that he were back.”

“That,” said Augustus, who had been reflecting upon his own life, “may make us realize that every human being whom we meet and get to know is, after all, something in our minds, like a tree planted in our gardens or a piece of furniture within our house. It may be better to keep them and try to put them to some use, than to cast them away and have nothing at all there in the end.” She thought of this for a little while. “Then the old Prince shall be,” said she, “within the garden of my mind a great fountain, made of black marble, near which it is always cool and fresh, and from which great cascades of water are rushing and playing. I shall go and sit there sometimes, when I have much to think of. If I had been Rosina I would not have tried to get away from him. I would have made him happy. It would have been good if he had been happy; it is hard to make anybody unhappy.”

Augustus, who thought he heard the note of a late regret in her voice, said in order to console her: “Remember now that you have saved the other’s life.” She changed color and was silent for a moment. Then she turned and looked at him with deep serenity. “Who,” she said, “would have stood by and heard a man so unjustly accused?”

As soon as her carriage was ready they started for Pisa and went at a great speed. The day was beginning to get warm, the road was dusty, and the shadows of the trees were keeping close underneath them. Augustus had left his address with the old doctor in case there would have to be an inquest, but after all the old Prince had died a natural death.