"She must be yours," she said at last, with the sternness of necessity in her voice, as if to repel with a second shock the terrible things that were ready to surge up from her fiery heart.
Seized by sudden anguish, incapable of interrupting by a word the lightning-like apparitions of her tragic soul, Stelio halted, and laid his hand on his companion's arm to make her stop also.
"Is it not true?" she asked with a sweetness almost calm, as if her tension had suddenly relaxed, and her passion had quietly accepted the yoke laid upon it by her will. "Speak! I do not fear to suffer. Let us sit down here. I am a little tired."
They sat down on a low wall, facing the water.
"What can I say to you?" said the young man in a stifled voice, after a pause, unable to overcome the agitation arising from the certainty of his present love and the consciousness of his desires, inexorable as fate. "Perhaps what you have imagined is true; perhaps it is only a fancy of your own mind. I am certain to-day of only one thing, and that is that I love you and recognize in you all that is noble. I know one other thing that is noble—that I have a work to do and a life to live according to the dictates of Nature. You, too, must remember. On that September evening I spoke to you a long time of my life and of the genii that are leading it to its final destiny. You know that I can renounce nothing."
He trembled as if he held in his hand a sharp weapon, with which, as he was compelled to move it, he could not avoid wounding the defenseless woman.
"No, nothing; and especially your love, which ceaselessly exalts my strength and my hope. But did you not promise me more than love? Can you not do for me things that love alone cannot do? Do you not desire to be the constant inspiration of my life and my work?"
She listened motionless, with fixed eyes.
"It is true," he continued, after an anxious pause, recovering his courage, and feeling that on the sincerity of this moment depended the fate of that free alliance whereby he had hoped to be broadened, not confined. "It is true; that evening, when I saw you descend the stairs in the midst of the throng in company with her who had sung, I believed that a secret thought guided you from the moment that you did not come alone to meet me."