That is just how I felt when Nino went away.

It seemed as though I could not breathe in the house or in the streets, and the little rooms at home were so quiet that one might hear a pin fall, and the cat purring through the closed doors.

Nino left at the beginning of the last ten days of Carnival, when the opera closed, so that it was soon Lent; and everything is quieter then.
But before he left us there was noise enough and bustle of preparation, and I did not think I should miss him; for he, always was making music, or walking about, or doing something to disturb me just at the very moment when I was most busy with my books.

Mariuccia, indeed, would ask me from time to time what I should do when Nino was gone, as if she could foretell what I was to feel.

I suppose she knew I was used to him, after fourteen years of it, and would be inclined to black humours for want of his voice.