Amaldi looked at her a moment, his face set. Then with a quick, almost violent, gesture he took her in his arms. "You shall not say that our love is a tragedy...." he muttered. But she sobbed on:
"It is ... it is!... Oh, why couldn't we have known each other ... from the first!..."
"But you love me ... now?"
"Oh, you know it ... you know it!..."
He put his hand up suddenly and turned her face to his. It gave him a strange thrill to feel her warm tears on his hand. He looked down into her eyes, and there was something imperious and fateful in this look.
".... Really love me?" he said.
Her "Yes" came in a whisper.
He kept his eyes on hers another second, then bent his mouth almost deliberately to hers.
".... Sei mia moglie ... sei la mia vera moglie...." (Thou art my wife ... thou art my real wife....), he kept whispering brokenly after that deep kiss. She clung to him in silence. Yes, she too felt that she belonged to him as she had never belonged to another; yet, to her, this was the supreme tragedy. With her heart at home on his—with all herself at home in him—she knew at last the love in which flesh and spirit are one essence—in which God the fire and God the fuel are one. But to know such love only after having passed through the nether fires of other loves—was not that the tragedy of tragedies? She would not have been true woman had she not felt it so, and he would not have been true man if, even in that hour, the memory of those other loves had not wrung him. But while it was the woman's way to confess this sense of tragedy, it was the man's way to deny it stoutly. So he told her over and over with passionate insistence that she had never known real love—that the great fire of his love would consume even the memory of her mistakes—that the past was nothing to him and should be nothing to her in the light of the present.
They sat there, locked in each other's arms for a long time. The sun was westering. The shadows of the cypresses lengthened along the grass until they seemed to leap softly from the river brink into the water.