And wishing to do that—wishing to save him, to do him justice—swayed, too, by pity for him and remorse for her broken promise, and crushed in spirit by her disappointment in Mario—she yielded.
“There is no other way,” she said, turning to him, wearily—“no other way to screen you—to meet the demand of honor.”
He caught up her hand and kissed it.
“You will never regret this act of justice,” he said, confident that his complete triumph was only a matter of time. Perhaps he betrayed the working of his mind in some unguarded gleam of the eye, some play of the lip, for she said to him, her manner showing grave determination:
“Don’t think I shall change—that you can swerve me in the least from this position. You must foster no false hopes. When I become your wife I shall remain to the last only that in appearance—in the eyes of the world. In reality I shall be as far removed from you as if I were actually married to another. I tell you this as emphatically as possible, because it is only just that you clearly understand what our marriage will mean to both.”
“All is quite clear,” Tarsis returned, cunningly.
“Oh, it is a terrible deed!” she exclaimed, the consequences rising to her mind and filling it with horror. “Think well, I beg of you. In despoiling me of my life’s happiness you are going to ruin your own. Perhaps you did not think I should make the conditions so absolute, so irrevocable. If you wish to withdraw your offer do so, and save us from a lot that can not fail to be one of misery so long as we both are alive.”
She had only multiplied his motives for wishing to make her his wife. She understood him even less than he understood her. At no time before had her beauty made such a living appeal to him. Until now it had never been his privilege to behold her when emotion was at play. Her outward image of loveliness was all she had ever revealed to him. The voice she gave him in the past was not the passionate one he had just heard; the soul her eyes had mirrored was not the one that looked from them when she spoke the name of Mario Forza. The heave of her bosom, the come and go of carnation in her cheeks, the tides of tenderness that rose amid her promises of a vehement strength, portrayed to him a Hera he had not known before—a woman he would have given all his vast fortune to win.
“What you have said does not deter me,” he told her, “though I apprehend the situation as fully as you wish me to. I accept.”
And thus the thread of the story took a new twist, but one of which Aunt Beatrice never learned, nor did Don Riccardo.