At dinner she eats little and talks incessantly of the journey, asking again and again what time it is, and at what time they are to start.

“Are you afraid of missing the train?” Signor Odoardo asks with a smile.

And yet, though he dissembles his impatience, it is as great as hers.  He longs to go away, far away.  Perhaps he may not return until spring.  He orders his luggage packed for an absence of two months.

Doretta goes to bed early, but all night long she tosses about under the bed-clothes, waking her nurse twenty times to ask:  “Is it time to get up?”

Signor Odoardo, too, is awake when the man-servant comes to call him the next morning at six o’clock.

“What sort of a day is it?”

“Very bad, sir—­just such another as yesterday.  In fact, if I might make the suggestion, sir, if it’s not necessary for you to start to-day—­”

“It is, Angelo.  Absolutely necessary.”

At the station there are only a few sleepy, depressed-looking travellers wrapped in furs.  They are all grumbling about the weather, about the cold, about the earliness of the hour, and declaring that nothing but the most urgent business would have got them out of bed at that time of day.  There is but one person in the station who is all liveliness and smiles—­Doretta.

The first-class compartment in which Signor Odoardo and his daughter find themselves is bitterly cold, in spite of foot-warmers, but Doretta finds the temperature delicious, and, if she dared, would open the windows for the pleasure of looking out.

“Are you happy, Doretta?”

“Oh, so happy!”

Ten years earlier, on a pleasanter day, but also in winter, Signor Odoardo had started on his wedding-journey.  Opposite him had sat a young girl, who looked as much like Doretta as a woman can look like a child; a pretty, sedate young girl, oh, so sweetly, tenderly in love with Signor Odoardo.  And as the train started he had asked her the same question: 

“Are you happy, Maria?”

And she had answered: 

“Oh, so happy!” just like Doretta.

The train races and flies.  Farewell, farewell, for ever, Signora Evelina.

And did Signora Evelina die of despair?

Oh, no; Signora Evelina has a perfect disposition and a delightful home.  The perfect disposition enables her not to take things too seriously, the delightful home affords her a thousand distractions.  Its windows do not all look towards Signor Odoardo’s residence.  One of them, for example, commands a little garden belonging to a worthy bachelor who smokes his pipe there on pleasant days.  Signora Evelina finds the worthy bachelor to her taste, and the worthy bachelor, who is an average-adjuster by profession, admires Signora Evelina’s eyes, and considers her handsomely and solidly enough put together to rank A No. 1 on Lloyd’s registers.