Nevertheless, in order to have peace, she signed the will, and her aunt thanked her effusively, and old Macomer's flat lips touched her forehead while he spoke a few words of gratified approval.
In the evening she told Bosio, the count's brother, of what she had done.

His gentle eyes looked at her thoughtfully for a few seconds, and he did not smile, nor did he make any observation.
A few minutes later he was talking of a picture he had seen for sale--a mere sketch, but by Ribera, called the Spagnoletto.

She made up her mind to buy it for him as a surprise, for it pleased her to give him pleasure.
But when she was alone in her room that night she recalled Bosio's expression when she had told him about the will.

She was sure that he was not pleased, and she wondered why he had not at least said something in reply--something quite indifferent perhaps, but yet something, instead of looking at her in total silence, just for those few seconds.
After all, she was really more intimate with him than with her aunt and uncle, and liked him better than either of them, so that she had a right to expect that he should have answered with something more than silence when she told him of such a matter.
She sat a long time in a deep chair near her toilet table, thinking about her own life, in the great dim room which half a dozen candles barely lighted; and perhaps it was the first time that she had really asked herself how long her present mode of existence was to continue, how long she was to lie half-hidden, as it were, in the sombrely respectable dimness of the Macomer establishment, how long she was to remain unmarried.

Knowing the customs of her own people in regard to marriage, as she did, it was certainly strange that she should not have heard of any offer made to her uncle and aunt for her hand.