“Forgive me,” said Tiretta. His mood was spent, exhausted for the moment; he could only utter that broken prayer.
She put her hand to her eyes, and seemed to stumble. He was by her side in a moment. “I did not mean it!” he said hoarsely. “God knows what tempted me!”
She looked up at him then very piteously.
“What gardens?” she whispered, as if she could have wept.
He answered like one in a dream:
“There were green bays; and the mist was over everything. Strange shapes came and went in it—they shrank and dilated. And the eyes of the women were like heaven in April—strange wet blue eyes behind the rain. They come out of sleep: they have haunted me since childhood—the strange eyes—the wild visions of the North. Ah, do not think me mad, Madonna!”
His breast was heaving, his hands entreating. She moved on, motioning to him to walk beside her. As they passed slowly together through the sweet scented shadows, he grew more composed—and she also, it seemed. Presently she spoke to him, in a low earnest voice:
“Will you try to forget it—never to let it be again?”
She held out her hand; and, like a man who delivers his own death-warrant, he detached the faded flower from his breast, and laid it reverently in that soft palm.
“Condemn me,” he muttered, walking with bowed head, “to a traitor’s death. I deserve the worst.”