"Nay," he said, with a sob in his voice, "it is thee I cannot bear to degrade."
"Nay," she said, "we are one in the depths together, now, and that will be the first bitter step on our joyful upward way."
But as they returned, it chanced that they lost the path and found themselves before the threshold of blind Bruno's hut.
And for the first time since his sorrow, the wronged man's heart was so light with the joy of forgiving that he was singing as he wove his baskets, chanting half-unconsciously the hymn "Apparebit repentina."
And the tones of the voice seemed familiar to Baron Ivo, and he paused and looked, and saw the upturned sightless face with the new peace on it, and recognized his wronged kinsman.
He strode up to him and knelt at his side, and said in a low voice half-stifled with shame and grief, "Bruno, you are avenged at last; I can never forgive myself. Can you forgive?" And after a brief pause from the quivering lips came the pardon,—
"I forgave you last night, thank God."
They said no more.
But on the morrow Baron Ivo gathered the whole of his retainers together, and as many of the townsmen as could come, and leading his kinsman, with his wife and child, to the chair of state in the great hall of the castle, he knelt before him and made confession of his wrong. And then, by his command (his last as their lord), his retainers took from him arms, and helmet, and sword, and coat of mail, and left him in rough woollen garments such as his serfs wore, girded with a rope; humbled and degraded, as he well knew, before no sympathetic eyes—for, large as the assembly was, there were few in it who had not against him some memory of rapine and wrong, and through the hall there was a murmur of execrations.
But the true Baron rose and said, "Let no man reproach him. ONE has atoned for him, and for me, and for all. Let no man reproach him, or pity me. For since I have seen that forgiving Face, I am content to be blind to all beside. Ecce Homo. Forgive, as He forgave."