But Cosimo's message aroused in us a memory that had lain dormant these days. She was no longer for my wooing. She was the wife of another.
It came to us almost as a flash of lightning in the night; and it startled us by all that it revealed.
“The fault of it is all mine,” said she, as we sat that evening in the gold-and-purple dining-room where we had supped.
It was with those words that she broke the silence that had endured throughout the repast, until the departure of the pages and the seneschal who had ministered to us precisely as in the days when Cavalcanti had been alive.
“Ah, not that, sweet!” I implored her, reaching a hand to her across the table.
“But it is true, my dear,” she answered, covering my hand with her own. “If I had shown you more mercy when so contritely you confessed your sin, mercy would have been shown to me. I should have known from the sign I had that we were destined for each other; that nothing that you had done could alter that. I did know it, and yet...” She halted there, her lip tremulous.
“And yet you did the only thing that you could do when your sweet purity was outraged by the knowledge of what I really had been.”
“But you were so no more,” she said with a something of pleading in her voice.
“It was you—the blessed sight of you that cleansed me,” I cried. “When love for you awoke in me, I knew love for the first time, for that other thing which I deemed love had none of love's holiness. Your image drove out all the sin from my soul. The peace which half a year of penance, of fasting and flagellation could not bring me, was brought me by my love for you when it awoke. It was as a purifying fire that turned to ashes all the evil of desires that my heart had held.”
Her hand pressed mine. She was weeping softly.