There is not one of us who would not rather be loved for what we are than for what we do; so it is perhaps no wonder if the young woman's reply strikes with an unreasonable chill upon the asker's heart.
"You must have been very little used to kindness all your life," he says, with some brusqueness, "to be so disproportionately grateful for my trumpery civilities."
She hesitates a moment, then:
"You are right," she replies; "I have not received any great kindness in my life—justice, well, yes, I suppose so—but no, not very much mercy."
Her candid and composed admission of a need for mercy whets yet farther that pained curiosity which has always been one of the strongest elements in his uncomfortable interest in her. But the very sharpness of that interest makes him shy away awkwardly from the subject of her past.
"I always think," he says, "that there is something fatuous in a man's apologizing to a lady for not having been to see her, as if the loss were hers, and not his."
"Is there? All the same, I am sorry that you did not come."
This simple and unsophisticated implication of a liking for him would have warmed again the uneasy heart that her former speech had chilled had not he, under the superficial though genuine regret of her face, seen, still shining with steady lustre, that radiance which has as little been called forth by, as it can be dimmed by him or anything relating to him. And so he passes by in silence the expression of that sorrow which he bitterly knows to be so supportable.
The still spirit of the day seems to have touched the very birds. They sing a few low notes in veiled, chastened voices from the fir-wood, and again are silent. The clock tells the hours in quarters to the doomed lives inside the monastery, self-doomed to suffering and penance and incarceration, even with the winning blue of the Tuscan sky above their tonsured heads, with the forget-me-nots pressing their feet, and the nightingales singing endless love-songs to them from the little dark forest nigh at hand.
"I suppose," says Elizabeth presently, in a reflective tone, "that the fact is, when people are in your position—I mean on the brink of a great deep happiness—they forget all lesser things?"