"Nor you either; I could not leave you in such a manner. I might have caused you remorse. You would have been the object of everybody's accusations. We could not have dissimulated with our mother. She would have asked you: 'Why should Juliana have wished to die?' She would have come to know the truth, which we have kept from her till now—poor saintly woman."
Emotion choked her utterance, her voice became hoarse, began to tremble, tearfully. I felt a lump rise in my throat, too.
"I thought of all that; and, when you wished to bring me here, I thought, too, that I was no longer worthy of her, that I was no longer worthy to receive her kisses on my forehead and be called her daughter. But you know how weak we are, how easily we give way to the force of circumstances. I had no more hope; I knew that, outside of death, there remained no other refuge for me; I knew that, every day, the circle was closing in more. And yet I permitted the days to pass, one by one, without taking any resolution. Yet I had a sure means of death."
She stopped. Obeying a sudden impulse, I raised my eyes, and looked at her fixedly. She shuddered violently; and the pain which my look caused her was so apparent that I lowered my forehead, and resumed my first attitude.
Up to now she had been standing. She sat down. An interval of silence followed.
"Do you believe," she asked me, with a timid and unhappy air, "do you believe that the sin is great when the soul did not consent?"
That allusion to the sin sufficed to stir up in me instantly the dregs that had settled, and a sort of bitter acridity rose to my mouth. An involuntary sarcasm left my lips. I said, affecting a smile:
"Poor soul!"
That expression caused a look of such intense pain to appear on Juliana's face that I felt immediately the acute sting of repentance. I understood that it were impossible for me to have inflicted a more cruel blow, and that, at that moment, and against such a poor, submissive creature, irony was the worst of cowardices.
"Forgive me," she said.