“I pray so,” he said, and then, in his turn, fired up to the roots of his hair. “Kitty, is it possible that you could have thought that of me?” he asked, as a new light broke upon him.
“I forgave you; but oh, Will, I am glad it was not that.”
“Nay, I think it was worse—I forgot you, and loved her with all my heart and soul.”
Katherine, as she has often told Cecilia, looked at Will, and felt her heart soften. Will’s mother had told her how lightly their vows lay on Italian wives; and she felt how Will’s fair English face, with its beauty and its haughtiness and its courageousness, must have appealed to such women. She could imagine a tender, lovely wife, who in England would have been beyond the reach of temptation—some woman perhaps supremely lovable—yearning to youth so godlike, and she forgave her the wrong done to his betrothed.
“Did you bring her trouble, Will?”
“But once—with a sorry jest of proposing for her hand.” He told her of his escapade at Syracuse.
“And then she married some man she did not love?”
“She never married.”
“And yet——?”
“Never—never, Kitty. But afterwards I longed for her as my wife, and begged and prayed her, and tried with my whole heart and strength to will her into marrying me. For weeks and weeks I have lived for nothing else.”