She had sprung to her feet in passionate amaze. “You!” she exclaimed; “ah, you!”
In the exclamation there was a great revulsion and greater joy. Her gaze swept his pallid features, his costume—her sick imagination had pictured him in scenes of ribaldry, with evil companions! She began to murmur broken sentences:
“I have wronged you! That night on the square—it was not the you that I had known! You had tried to leave that life behind—the past that had given you that name! You are not what they say,—not now! Not now!”
He stopped her with a gesture.
“It is I who have wronged you,” he said in a voice hard from repression. “Do not judge me by this robe; it means less than nothing. I am here by the veriest accident. Not for penance or shriving.”
For an instant she recoiled, instinct groping in the maze of doubt. What was he, erring angel or masquerading devil? It was the question she had cried to herself all this time, blindly, passionately, her judgment all astray—the query that silence had at last answered with the conviction in which her long-planned marriage had seemed as acceptable a fate as any. Now her soul, wavering anew, spoke its agony in a direct appeal:
“Tell me! tell me the truth!” she pleaded piteously. “I have suffered so since that night. I have not known—how could I know?—what to think. I believed what you said at La Mira, every word! And it is not your past I think of now; it is only what you were that very hour and since,—and what you are to-day. Was it only a play—to make me sorry? Did you pretend it all?”
“Teresa!” he entreated.
“You said that night that I must forget we had ever met. Did that mean you merely pitied and spared me? That you are still to be—all that Venice says?”
“It was what I had been that counted!”