"No," Ninitta returned simply; "how could I be when I was betrothed to you?"
"But that was broken off—"
The sentence stuck in his throat; and he wondered that he could have begun it. He wondered, too, how he could even have doubted the faith of the woman before him; and most of all he wondered if he had ever really loved her. He had an irritating consciousness that something was expected of him which he was unwilling to give; some sign of tenderness, some caress such as befitted the reconciliation of lovers long separated by misunderstanding and blinding jealousy. He felt as if he were falling below the demands of the occasion, most annoying of sensations to the masculine mind. But an important interview can with difficulty be changed from the key in which it is begun, and even had his feelings prompted a display of tenderness, he felt that it would seem abrupt and forced. He waited for Ninitta to speak.
"Yes," she said, after a moment, as he did not continue, "it was broken off, but Signor Hoffmeir said that was because you did not understand, and that everything would be as it had been when you got his letter."
A sad hopelessness began to appear in her eyes; she had of old been too accustomed to submit to her lover's will to assume the initiative now, despite the development and strength which time had given to her character. The sculptor did not dream how her heart throbbed beneath her quiet demeanor, but he was too sensitive not to be touched by the unconscious appeal of her voice and look.
Seven years before, an enthusiastic student in Rome, he had loved or believed he loved, the peasant girl Ninitta, whom he had found in an excursion to Capri and induced to come to the Eternal City as a model.
Too honorable to betray her, he had meant to make the model his wife, and was betrothed to her with a solemnity of which he was keenly reminded to-day by the ring which she still wore upon her finger. Circumstances had convinced him, however, that Ninitta was deceiving him, and that she preferred the artist Hoffmeir, his best friend. To break off both engagement and friendship without listening to a word of explanation, to leave Rome and Italy, were comparatively easy for a passionate man stung to the quick by a double treachery. To forget was more difficult, and although a thousand times had Herman assured himself that he had extinguished the last spark of emotion concerning this episode, the faintest breath of an old memory was still sufficient to rekindle some seemingly dead ember. To-day, holding in his hand the letter from his lost friend which removed all his doubts, he saw that instead of being injured he had himself been cruel and unjust; he felt the full anguish of having committed an irreparable fault. We may outlive our past; its sorrows we may forget, its wrongs we may forgive, we may even smile at its crushed hopes, ambitions and loves with scarcely a tinge of bitterness; but that which we have been stings us ever with the burning pain of an undying remorse. It is not what we have done which awakens our deepest self-scorn; it is the fact that we were this which made it possible for us to do it. To feel that he had been capable of the cruelty of abandoning his betrothed and of wounding his closest friend, merely from a groundless suspicion, was to Grant Herman a pain never to be wholly outlived.
Nor was he without a teasing pain, through a less noble trait in his nature, from the consciousness that he had loved Ninitta. Once the fires of love have burned out, any mortal is apt to be lost in amazed wonderment how they were ever kindled; and that it was hard for Grant Herman, at thirty-five, to understand how Grant Herman, at twenty-seven, could have adored an Italian peasant model is not so without precedent as to be wholly incomprehensible.
Ninitta had been a good girl, his thoughts ran, was doubtless so still; her figure was enchanting, he would have been no sculptor had he failed to appreciate that; he had been a boy, a foolish youngster to be dizzied by a rushing of the blood to his head; but to make her his wife now——
"Ninitta," he said, suddenly, breaking off from his thoughts into words, "I am not well to-day: come to-morrow. Are you comfortably settled in town? Do you need money?"