"But why? I do not understand. What wild fancy is this of yours? Does my love offend you? Do you not love me in the same way?"
His irritation and misunderstanding only aggravated her suffering. She covered her face with her hands. Her heart throbbed with hammer-like beating in her rigid breast, seeming to echo in her brain.
Presently she raised her head and looked at him with painful effort.
"I have a heart, Stelio," she said, with trembling lips, as if she were struggling with a sort of fierce timidity in order to force herself to speak those words. "I suffer from a heart, too keenly alive—oh, Stelio, alive and eager and anguished as you never will know...."
She smiled the sweet, faint smile with which she sought to disguise her suffering; hesitated a moment, then reached toward a bunch of violets, which she took and pressed close to her lips. Her eyelids drooped, her classic brow, between her dark hair and the flowers, showed its ivory-like beauty.
"You wound my heart sometimes, Stelio," she said softly, her lips still caressing the violets. "Sometimes you are cruel to it."
It seemed as if those fragrant, humble blossoms helped her to confess her sadness, to veil still more the timid reproach she had made to her beloved. She was silent; Stelio bowed his head. The logs on the hearth crackled; the autumn rain fell monotonously in the fading garden.
"I long for kindness, with a thirst that you never will understand. For that deep, true kindness, dear friend, which does not speak but which comprehends, which knows how to give all in a single look or a single movement; which is strong, sure, always armed against the evil impulse that tempts us. Do you know the sort of kindness I mean?"
Her voice, alternately strong and wavering, was so warm with inner light, was so full of revelation of a soul, that it passed through the young man's blood more like a spiritual essence than a sound.
"In you, yes, Foscarina, I know it."