He asked her what it meant, but she stood as one turned to stone.
“God!” exclaimed Don Riccardo. “He gives you up—puts justice before love! That is the meaning. Bah! Then you are well rid of him, my daughter. The bloodless reasoner! Ah, lovers did not so in my day. Indeed it is an age of machine-made men.”
For Hera it was a withering disappointment. Hers was no romantic schoolgirl’s attachment, but the full-powered, storm-surviving passion of a woman of twenty-four—a passion heeding no call before that of itself. And fondly she had dreamed that with Mario it was the same. But the message told her—what a different story! He confessed a love stronger, higher than that which he bore for her—the love of justice, a lifeless abstraction. Suddenly he became little in her eyes, and she recoiled from the chill of such a nature. Here then was the desolate ending of the sweet poem life had begun to read for her; the shattering of a beautiful faith, the farewell to an ideal that had budded in girlhood and blossomed with woman’s estate.
The sound of an affected cough startled her and Don Riccardo from their gloomy reflections. They looked up and beheld Tarsis at the threshold, but they were not in time to see the contented smile of comprehension that had curved his lip.
“I beg your pardon,” he said, moving toward them. “The outer door was open, and I took the liberty of entering unannounced. I did not know you were here.”
Hera arose and walked to where her father stood surveying Tarsis with eyes that betrayed an emotion of anger strange indeed to the happy-go-lucky Duke. She asked him for the telegram, and absently he placed it in her hand.
“It is better, I think, that you leave us for the present,” she said, in a low voice.
“What shall you do?” Don Riccardo asked, his impulse to intercede going the way it had gone often before.
“That which honor commands,” she answered, coldly, desperately. So Don Riccardo, torn by warring impulses, but unable to be more than nature had ordained, made off slowly, to wait in the library, with a glass at his elbow and a cigar in his lips.
“The answer from Rome has arrived,” Hera said, and gave Tarsis the message.