And she, thus looking into that face which only lived through the eyes, saw all around her the narrow white-washed walls of the tapperij fading away into darkness. In their stead she saw a narrow passage, dark and gloomy, and in its remotest and darkest corner a figure cowered, clad in dark clothes from head to foot and wearing a mask of leather upon its face--the assassin waiting for his prey. And she saw Ramon--handsome, light-hearted, debonnaire Ramon--her kinsman and her lover, standing unsuspecting by. She saw it all--the picture as her father had painted it for her edification. The assassin lying in wait--Ramon unsuspecting. She saw the murder committed there in the dark, the stealthy, surreptitious blow. She saw Ramon totter and fall--but before falling turn on the dastardly murderer, and with hand already half paralysed by oncoming death, deal him a deep and gashing wound ... in the left fore-arm ... with his dagger which tore flesh and muscle between elbow and wrist right through to the bone.
And while she looked straight into his eyes and yet saw nothing but the vision of that awful deed, her lips murmured automatically the four accusing words:
"Then it was you!"
He had not for one second lost his hold upon himself, since that awful moment when he realised that she guessed. He had no idea that don Ramon, at the point of death, had spoken of the wound which he had inflicted on the man who had meted out summary justice to him for his crimes. But now he knew that the secret which he would have buried with him in a bottomless grave was known to her--to the woman whom he had learned to love with his whole soul. She knew now, and henceforth they must be not only strangers but bitter enemies. Nothing--not even perhaps his own death--would ever wipe away the sense of utter abhorrence wherewith she regarded him now. He took his last look of her as one does of one infinitely dear, who sinks into the arms of Death.
He drank in every line of her exquisite face, the child-like contour of chin and throat, her alabaster-like skin, the exquisite mouth which he was destined now never to touch with his yearning lips. In this supreme moment, his love for her--only just in its infancy--rose to its full effulgence; he knew now that he worshipped her, and knew that never while the shadow of her dead kinsman stood between them would he hold her in his arms.
"Then it was you!" she murmured again, and with those fateful words pronounced his condemnation and her own indomitable hate.
"Madonna," he entreated, speaking with the infinite tenderness and pity which filled his heart, "will you deign to listen, if I try to plead mine own cause?"
But no look of softness came into her eyes: they were glowing and dry and unseeing: she did not see him--not Mark, her husband as he stood there now before her--she saw him cowering in a dark corner, clad in sombre clothes and wearing a leather mask--she saw him with an assassin's dagger in his hand and she saw Ramon lying dead at his feet.
"Then it was you!" she said for the third time.
And he bent his head in mute avowal.