“I don’t think I ever hated you.”
“Hatred, you know, is the other side of love.”
“Then perhaps I did. Yes—I did.”
“How long my conscience was inactive, was useless to me! It needed a lesson, a terrible lesson. It needed a cruel blow to rouse it.”
“And mine!” she answered, in a low voice.
“We shall make many mistakes, both of us,” he said. “But I think, after that night, we can never for very long misunderstand each other. For that night we were sincere.”
“Let us always be sincere.”
“Sincerity is the rock on which one should build the house of life.”
“Let us—you and I—let us build upon it our palace of the spirits.”
Then they were silent again. They were silent until the boat passed the point, until in the distance the island appeared, even until the prow of the boat grated against the rock beneath the window of the Casa del Mare.