"After the Ave Maria, at first dark,
I will be standing on the terrace, say!"
She knew he would come, and prayed to God all day. At "an intense throe of the dusk" she started up—she "dared to say," in her dying speech, that she was divinely pushed out on the terrace—and there he waited her, with the same silent and solemn face, "at watch to save me."
He had come, as he defiantly had said, and not the husband met him, but, at the window, with a lamp in her hand, "Our Lady of all the Sorrows." He knelt, but even as he knelt she vanished, only to reappear on the terrace, so close above him that she could almost touch his head if she bent down—"and she did bend, while I stood still as stone, all eye, all ear."
First she told him that she could neither read nor write, but that the letters said to be from him had been read to her, and seemed to say that he loved her. She did not believe that he meant that as Margherita meant it; but "good true love would help me now so much" that at last she had resolved to see him. Her whole life was so strange that this but belonged to the rest: that an utter stranger should be able to help her—he, and he alone! She told him her story. There was a reason now at last why she must fly from "this fell house of hate," and she would take from Caponsacchi's love what she needed: enough to save her life with—
". . . Take me to Rome!
Take me as you would take a dog, I think,
Masterless left for strangers to maltreat:
Take me home like that—leave me in the house
Where the father and mother are" . . .
She tells his answer thus:
"He replied—
The first word I heard ever from his lips,
All himself in it—an eternity
Of speech, to match the immeasurable depth
O' the soul that then broke silence—'I am yours.'"
* * * * *