She was no longer for my wooing. She was the wife of another.
It came to us almost as a flash of lightning in the night; and it startled
us by all that it revealed.
"The fault of it is all mine," said she, as we sat that evening in the
gold-and-purple dining-room where we had supped.
It was with those words that she broke the silence that had endured
throughout the repast, until the departure of the pages and the seneschal
who had ministered to us precisely as in the days when Cavalcanti had been
alive.
"Ah, not that, sweet!" I implored her, reaching a hand to her across the
table.
"But it is true, my dear," she answered, covering my hand with her own.
"If I had shown you more mercy when so contritely you confessed your sin,
mercy would have been shown to me. I should have known from the sign I had
that we were destined for each other; that nothing that you had done could
alter that. I did know it, and yet..." She halted there, her lip
tremulous.
"And yet you did the only thing that you could do when your sweet purity
was outraged by the knowledge of what I really had been."
"But you were so no more," she said with a something of pleading in her
voice.
"It was you--the blessed sight of you that cleansed me," I cried. "When
love for you awoke in me, I knew love for the first time, for that other
thing which I deemed love had none of love's holiness.
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