He turned his eyes from the pitifulness of her face.
"It matters," he said, "only in what is to become of us. If it is true, we can never go back to Venice. I must be an outcast from my city and from my people."
She crept nearer to him, where they sat on the cliff's edge, nearer, on her knees, looking eagerly into his face.
"And, lord," she said, watching him, "if it is true—sufficiently true—would you suffer that for my sake? Would you give up all that to go with me?"
"How could I do otherwise?" said young Zuan, simply, and at that the woman broke into a little sobbing laugh of joy and triumph and tenderness.
"Oh, lord!" she cried, "that were love indeed! Oh, lord, I did not know that there were men so faithful and so good.
"And yet," she said, presently, as if in argument with herself—"yet noble lords of Venice and of Genoa and of Naples and of many Italian cities have married queens and princesses no better than the Princess Yaga."
"It is not that only," said young Zuan. "There are many evil women in high places—fawned before, bowed down to—in Italy; but you have done one very terrible and shameful thing, princess, which alone must make you hated in Venice forever, and must make marriage between you and me impossible there."
"I—do not understand," she said, wondering.
"You or your brigands," he said, "carried off from Ragusa Natalia Volutich. I was to have married her."