“No, no, nor I, but listen. I was alone; at home, in the street, in the turmoil of society everywhere; always alone except when I was by your side. A fatality ... nay, I will not give that conventional name to the consequences of our own errors and want of foresight.... I will say the situation in which we had placed ourselves forbid our declaring honestly the feelings of our hearts. We were both married.”
“Yes,” said Pepa calmly and steadily, as having often made the same reflection, and said the same thing to herself, having contemplated the fact many times and from every possible point of view.
“Now, to be sure, you are free, but I am not. The situation is not materially altered; but the fact that you are a widow is maddening me.—I ought not to be here at this moment—and yet here I am! When I see you and Monina dressed in black I am filled with a ferment of sacrilegious passion; I struggle to quell it and be silent, but you yourself drag me on with irresistible force and compel me.... Well, there is but one way of saying it ... to tell you that I love you; that I have loved you for a long time. I cannot find courage or words to curse this passion, which in me is the outcome of my banishment from all happiness, and in you of ... I don’t know what.”
“It was born with me,” said Pepa under her breath. “You have told me what my heart knew already.... But to hear you say it ... with your own lips ... here, to my face.... Here, where only God and I can hear....”
Her voice failed her and she turned as pale as death: she could find no utterance for the feelings that crowded on her soul, but she seized one of Leon’s hands and kissed it again and again with passionate tenderness.
“We are in a very difficult position,” he said. “We must face it together.”
“A difficult position!” repeated Pepa with candid surprise, as though to her it seemed a very simple matter.
“Yes, for at this moment we are both the victims of calumny.”
Pepa shrugged her shoulders as much as to say: “What do I care for calumny?”
“You will feel with me that I made a great mistake in coming to live so near you.”