“My friend, why do you suffer?” she asked, leaning over him with a face transfigured with the grandeur of her loving charity, taking his hand and caressing it like that of a sick child in pain. “You oughtn’t to suffer. You have been an upright and just man. Your life has no remorses; it was guided by a moral conscience, tranquil and firm. You have not sinned--that I know; you have caused sorrow to none. Yours is a life without remorse, and so beautiful that suffering ought not to touch it.”
He looked at her ardently, almost drinking in her words like some divine liquor.
“You ought not to suffer. You are no longer alone in life; your friend is near you, near your heart, desiring one thing only, that you may not suffer, that you may no longer feel lonely, that you may possess a soul near you and for you----”
He looked at her passionately, and every one of her words seemed to intoxicate him. She, too, seemed exhilarated with compassion, tenderness, and devotion.
“Emilio, it is your Maria who is here,” she said solemnly.
Then like a madman he took her in his arms, pressed her madly to his breast in a frenzied embrace, and kissed her long, while she, trembling and lost, closed her eyes as before a mortal peril. But immediately, as if the contact of her person had scorched him, as if the lips which had not given him a kiss had scorched him, he pushed Maria brutally aside, crying out at her--
“Emilio!” she exclaimed, in complete amazement.
“Go away, go away. You cause me horror!” he yelled in her face like a madman.
“It is true, it is true,” he yelled, “but I can’t forget. Go away, go away; I can’t forget.”
So she went, bent, defeated, and broken by the incomparable weight of the truth.
In one of the large reception-rooms of Casa Nerola, near a bank formed of an enormous group of Hortense roses, two young girls stand talking and smiling discreetly, slowly moving their little white fans. The one, Theresa Santacroce, is dressed in light blue, with a silver belt, her hair arranged high with a circlet of silver ivy leaves. The other, Stefania Farnese, is dressed in ivory silk, and two large red roses in her chestnut hair give her a Spanish appearance, although her beauty is delicate.