Emilia was smitten with a fear that he would speak of it when she next saw him.  “Oh!  I hope he will be just the same as he has been,” she sighed; and with much melancholy shook her head at her fair reflection, and began to undress.  It had not struck her with surprise that two men should be loving her, until, standing away from the purple folds, she seemed to grow smaller and smaller, as a fire-log robbed of its flame, and felt insufficient and weak.  This was a new sensation.  She depended no more on her own vital sincerity.  It was in her nature, doubtless, to crave constantly for approval, but in the service of personal beauty instead of divine Art, she found herself utterly unwound without it:  victim of a sense of most uncomfortable hollowness.  She was glad to extinguish the candle and be covered up dark in the circle of her warmth.  Then her young blood sang to her again.

An hour before breakfast every morning she read with Merthyr.  Now, this morning how was she to appear to him?  There would be no reading, of course.  How could he think of teaching one to whom he trembled.  Emilia trusted that she might see no change in him, and, above all, that he would not speak of his love for her.  Nevertheless, she put on her robe of conquest, having first rejected with distaste a plainer garb.  She went down the stairs slowly.  Merthyr was in the library awaiting her.  “You are late,” he said, eyeing the dress as a thing apart from her, and remarking that it was hardly suited for morning wear.  “Yellow, if you must have a strong colour, and you wouldn’t exhibit the schwartz-gelb of the Tedeschi willingly.  But now!”

This was the signal for the reading to commence.

“Wilfrid would not have been so cold to me,” thought Emilia, turning the leaves of Ariosto as a book of ashes.  Not a word of love appeared to be in his mind.  This she did not regret; but she thirsted for the assuring look.  His eyes were quietly friendly.  So friendly was he, that he blamed her for inattention, and took her once to task about a melodious accent in which she vulgarized the vowels.  All the flattery of the Branciani dress could not keep Emilia from her feeling of smallness.  Was it possible that he loved her?  She watched him as eagerly as her shyness would permit.  Any shadow of a change was spied for.  Getting no softness from him, or superadded kindness, no shadow of a change in that direction, she stumbled in her reading purposely, to draw down rebuke; her construing was villanously bad.  He told her so, and she replied:  “I don’t like poetry.”  But seeing him exchange Ariosto for Roman History, she murmured, “I like Dante.”  Merthyr plunged her remorselessly into the second Punic war.

But there was worse to follow.  She was informed that after breakfast she would be called upon to repeat the principal facts she had been reading of.  Emilia groaned audibly.

“Take the book,” said Merthyr.