"Shall we walk across the island, Vittorio? We shall always find a steamer on the other side to take us back to Venice."
"Let us walk."
They walked in silence along the little garden in course of construction, by villas hardly finished, beneath the young trees, amidst the white electric lamps and the shadows formed between the lamps. Suddenly Lucio Sabini stopped. He leant over the fence of a garden covered with rambler roses and said in a desperate voice:
"Vittorio, I killed Lilian Temple."
"Don't say that, don't say that."
"I committed the crime, Vittorio. I killed her. It is as if I had taken her by the hand, led her up there to the Isola Persa, and pointing to the precipice had said to her—'Throw yourself down.' Thus am I guilty."
"Your reasonable grief blinds you, Lucio."
"No, no," he answered in his desperate voice, "I am not blind, I am not mad. Time has passed over my sorrow: it has become vast and deep like a great, black lake which I have in the depths of my soul. I am neither mad nor blind. I exist, I live, I perform coldly and surely all the acts of life. Nevertheless, I committed a crime, in thrusting Lilian Temple to her death with my very own hands."
"But you are not an assassin, you are not a cruel man," protested Vittorio vehemently. "You could not have done it."
"That is true: I am not an assassin, I am not a cruel man, but every unconscious word of mine, every unconscious act of mine, was a mortal thrust whereby this creature of beauty and purity, whereby this gentle creature should go to her death."