"Marco ... don't you understand?" she whispered. "I ... I want you to know ... that I...." She caught her breath. ".... It's ... it's ... love, Marco...."
A profound instinct told him not to touch her. The black mist closed down again for an instant. His bewildered, haggard face went to her heart. Close to him, trembling, her eyes still courageous and timid at the same time, she laid one hand upon his breast.
"Dearest," she said, "don't look like that ... as if you couldn't believe me ... you'll have to be very patient with me...."
She put down her forehead suddenly on the hand that still rested against his breast, and began to cry softly and restrainedly, like an overtaxed child. Then his arms went round her, but very lightly, as if she were indeed a wounded child that he was afraid of hurting.
"Forgive me.... I can't help it...." she kept murmuring. "To find you alive ... alive...."
The words choked into sobs. He stood holding her in that light, gentle embrace silently. He could not have spoken though both their lives depended on it. Presently she lifted her head from his breast and glanced up at him. His face awed her. There was a look on it that made it quite beautiful and rather strange. The look of one who sees with other than bodily vision.
When she said timidly a moment later that she must be going now, he did not try to detain her, only lifted the hand that had lain upon his breast, and held it to his lips, then to his eyes a moment.
In some natures tenderness springs from passion; in others passion can only flower from tenderness. Sophy was of the latter type. With all her capacity for suffering, she could never have felt the excoriating pain of the being bound by sensual fascination to another whom it knows to be despicable. This quality in the very essence of her nature was the secret of her ardent ventures in love and her equally ardent recoils from it.
But though her present love for Amaldi was all tenderness there was in it also such anguish as passion sometimes brings. Pure as it was, almost mystic in its exaltation, it yet shamed her to herself. Was she then the sort of woman who loves, and loves and loves indefinitely? She fought her way out of this doubt, only to stand confounded and miserable before the bald fact that she had had two husbands, one of whom was still living, and yet, that in a future no matter how vague and distant, she contemplated taking another. "It must be a long, long time...." she had written Amaldi after those moments in Clarges Street. "Years and years, perhaps. It isn't that I shrink from you, my dear one—oh, you know that!—but from the thought of marriage with any one. I can't help it, dearest. I told you that you would need all your patience with me—— Yes— I shall try you sorely I'm afraid. I wonder—but no—when I think of your love for me, I feel that I have never before known real love. And see how selfish I am with you! This is your reward—a cruel egoist, who can't give you up—who can't give you herself. That is the truth, Marco. It isn't that I will not— I cannot. Besides——"