“How can we know what to do?” she asked of him, humbly.
“Ah, it is hard to know what to do—to decide what is right. But there is a path that we may follow with safety at all times. It is the path which keeps us true to ourselves. We have a right to be true to ourselves!” he asserted, warmly—“a right no man may deny.”
“And when one renounces that right for the sake of others?” she asked. “What then?”
“That is the noblest of all self-sacrifices,” he answered her, reverently.
But in her sudden release of a breath and the drooping of her eyes he read, with the magic sensitivity of love, that his answer was a disappointment; that for the bread of censure the woman asked he had given a stone of praise. When he spoke again Hera, with quickening pulse, knew the calm of his character was going; and she was glad for the passion in his tone and the anger that hardened his voice.
“The sacrifice is divine!” he exclaimed. “But the demand for it, the permitting of it, that is monstrous! No human interest can justify the ruin of a life, the desecration of a soul!”
He drew closer to her, his studied control of the past all gone.
“Donna Hera!” he cried, “this must not be—this marriage to-morrow. It is hideous in the eye of God and man.”
There was command in his words, and the glow of a splendid hope filled her soul. But it lived only a moment, assailed by the thought that commiseration was all that he had for her.
“Well may you pity me,” she said, the doubt that had risen bringing a dreary smile to her lips.