"It is not yet mine."
"It will be?" She put the question eagerly.
Wilfrid hesitated, and by his adept hesitation succeeded in throwing her off the jealous scent.
"Say that it will be, my Wilfrid!"
"You must give me time"
"This subject always makes you cold."
"My own Lena!"
"Can I be, if we are doomed to be parted when we die?"
There is small space for compunction in a man's heart when he is in Wilfrid's state, burning with the revival of what seemed to him a superhuman attachment. He had no design to break his acknowledged bondage to Countess Lena, and answered her tender speech almost as tenderly.
It never occurred to him, as he was walking down to Meran with Vittoria, that she could suppose him to be bartering to help rescue the life of a wretched man in return for soft confidential looks of entreaty; nor did he reflect, that when cast on him, they might mean no more than the wish to move him for a charitable purpose. The completeness of her fascination was shown by his reading her entirely by his own emotions, so that a lowly-uttered word, or a wavering unwilling glance, made him think that she was subdued by the charm of the old days.