myself, who could care for so heart-bare, desolate a man as I? And some touch of the hand, some tone in the whispering voice, by-and-by informed me that this woman, who could lay aside all pride and thought of self, to come to me in my hour of agony, was Silvia, to whom I had dealt out such bitter mercy, and who, it now appeared, had loved me through it all, aye! from the first day to the last, while you, whom I had loved a hundred-fold more than I ever did her, had cast me from you as unhesitatingly, as coolly, as a withered flower or a soiled glove. I did not question how she knew my story. I asked no reasons for her coming; she gave none. She had only fled to me in my misery; recking, caring nothing for name or reputation—so I thought then—good God!
"The night wore on: her love, her tenderness, her clinging beauty, her great love worked in me like a charm. I have told you that in that hour I hated you for your falseness; well, in that hour I loved that woman for her truth. Had she not through good and evil report clung to me? Did not her own sin show white as snow beside your black, barefaced desertion? And remember that I was mad, child; utterly mad! My higher, better nature was dead within me. All reasoning, thinking power had gone out of me, and so—God knows the rest!—the maddening wiles of the woman, the rage that filled my heart against you . . . and the morning found us standing together before a priest, and, later on, at the British embassy man and wife.
"Even then the madness had not passed. I did not know what I had done, did not know what I had married. The darkness still lay upon my eyes. She was to me simply a woman who had been faithful; you a woman who had betrayed me. My thoughts never went any further than that. I did not love her, and did not hate her; I had simply no feeling for her whatever.
"We went to Florence immediately. Tempest was at that moment in the town, if we had known it. With the usual fatality
