“Admit,” said Joseph: “have you not a little exaggerated the cause in order to justify the end? The name you gave yourself——”
“It was given me, sir, by implication.”
“By whom or what? The sweetest and most innocent lips in the world? You wrong them, I am sure, even more than you do yourself or me. But the fault was mine, you say; yet I had always honestly thought you insusceptible to such emotions—a dreamer, a wooer of abstractions. Well, I was mistaken, it seems. Your strength was unequal to the task my faith in it imposed on you. Which of us was most to blame—I in directing, you in accepting? What need to quarrel about that now? We have made a botch of it between us, and the thing for us to discuss is how best to mend a lamentable case. Will you not tell me the whole truth, Tiretta, my friend?”
“Before God, I will.” The man was profoundly touched.
“Then, say, are you to her what she is to you?”
“That were impossible.”
“Nay, you equivocate.”
“On my soul, then, I believe that, heaven helping us, she would give me her hand to-morrow.”
A slight tremor seemed to take the archduke’s features. He stood back, quitting his hold on the other. A minute’s tense silence ensued.
“Well,” he said at length, just repressing a sigh. “I repeat I am in your hands.”