"Hush, hush!" she begged. "Do not speak like that! Do not prevent me from saying what it is that troubles me! Why do you not help me?"
She shrank back among the cushions, and looked fixedly at the fire, to avoid meeting the eyes of her beloved.
"More than once I have seen a look in your eyes that has filled me with horror," she said at last, with a touch of hoarseness in her effort to speak.
Stelio started, but dared not contradict her.
"Yes, with horror," she repeated, in a clearer tone, implacable against herself, having already triumphed over her fear and regained her courage.
Both were now face to face with the truth.
She continued without faltering.
"The first time I saw it was out there in the garden—that night—you know! I understood then what it was you saw in me; all the mire over which I have walked, all the infamy that clung to my feet, all the impurity for which I have so much disgust! Ah, you could not have acknowledged the visions that kindled your thoughts that night! Your eyes were cruel and your mouth was convulsed. When you felt that you wounded my sensitiveness, you took pity on me. But then—but since then"—
Her face was covered with blushes; her voice had grown impetuous, and her eyes were brilliant.
"To have nourished for years, with all the best that was in me, a sentiment of devotion and unbounded admiration, near you or from afar, in joy and in sadness; to have accepted in the purest spirit all the consolation offered by you to mankind through your poetry, and to have awaited eagerly other gifts, even higher and more consoling; to have believed in the great force of your genius since its dawn, and never to have relaxed my watch over your ascent, and to have accompanied it with a wish that has been my morning and evening prayer all these years; to have continued, with silent fervor, the effort to give some beauty and harmony to my own spirit, that it might be more worthy to approach yours; so many times, on the stage, before an ardent audience, to have pronounced with a thrill some immortal phrase, thinking of those which perhaps one day you would communicate to mankind through my lips; to have worked without respite, to have tried always to rise to a higher and simpler form in my art, to have aspired unceasingly to perfection, fearing that nothing less would please you, that otherwise I should seem inferior to your dream; to have loved my fleeting glory only because some day it might serve yours; to have hastened, with the fervent confidence of faith, the latest of your revelations, that I might offer myself to you as the instrument of your victory before my own decay; against all and everything, to have defended this secret ideal in my soul, against all and against myself as much as against others; to have made of you my melancholy, my steadfast hope, my heroic test, the symbol of all things good, strong, and free—ah, Stelio! Stelio!"—